If you’d like to receive something in the mail, from me, simply fill out this form.
Suffice it to say I’ll share your information with absolutely no one.
Each package or letter will include
something handwritten;
something found (it won’t be garbage, but it also won’t be an obvious item to include in a letter/package);
something I currently have; and,
other things as is my wont.
It’s going to be mostly if not entirely paper, because international mail is balling out of control these days and it has to stay pretty light. I’ll send them at the rate of two per week so depending on where you fall on the list, you might not get something for a few months. (Or if no one wants anything, you’ll never get it. How’s that for a zen koan.)
Ok that’s it. You can stop reading or continue and find out why I’m doing this.
I used to send and receive a lot of mail.
There are a few boxes at my parents’ house filled with the correspondence of days gone by. (Sorry mum and dad!) One has a treasure-trove of mid-90’s nostalgia other people sent me on cassette: songs recorded off the radio, an audio tour of Paris, chapters read from books. Most are from my great letter writing period that ended around 2001.
Nothing makes you think about the sheer physicality of stuff like living in London. I’ve had five fixed addresses in seven years, and that doesn’t count the 6 months I spent wandering from friend to Airbnb to Berlin. And each time I moved I swore I’d remember how terrible moving is, and that I wouldn’t amass yet another pile of things having just rid myself of the previous one before moving…
And then I’d do it again.
That, and the utter deterioration of my handwriting, and the inexorable digitisation of all existence, means I’ve basically stopped mailing anything to anyone not named Mr. and Mrs. Wong.
But lately, I’ve been muttering mantras to myself. Little code phrases, you might call them rules, like verbal talismans to ward off the coming apocalypse.
Whatever once was can be again.
Just because something is physical doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
Tastes change and then change back.
If something begs the question it means the question presupposes the answer it’s meant to be looking for; it doesn’t mean “raises the question”. Or it didn’t mean that and now it does, because language is mutable. That is the very basis of language, the ability to change, to grow, to adapt to circumstance. Without that language would never have developed in the first place. To be what it is, it has to stop being what it would be.
Asparagus is the best vegetable.
And so, with apologies for possibly introducing something into your life you’ll guiltily hang onto much longer than you want, I’d like to use the postal service again. If that sounds like a thing you’d like, let me know.