Dead Letter Department #26

(did you miss dead letter department #25? read about ghost towns & hyacinth bulbs here!)

weather report

I think about the wind more on Sundays because that’s when I take the garbage bins out. It’s annoying to have to chase recycleables all over the yard, but I also imagine my neighbors judging the amount of online ordering I’ve been doing, or questioning how one person could eat so much maple yogurt (answer: with a great deal of diligence & those big bags of frozen cherries from Costco).

A package arrived yesterday that was not for me or any of my neighbors—the address, if it existed, would be between the white marble monument & the row of trees in the park across the street. I opened it up hoping to find an invoice or a packing list with a phone number I could call to return it but there was nothing of the kind inside, only three purple velvet bags full of puzzle pieces. I’d never even heard of the carrier before, and the return address led back to one of those anonymous shipping facilities in California that manage overseas goods. If we lived in a better world, the completed puzzles would lead me on a quest, and at the end of the quest would be a treasure that had been foreshadowed in the text but still wasn’t exactly what I expected. Because we live here instead, I have to do personal development on my own without the benefit of plot devices, & I am very, very tired of it.

If you’re not careful, you start to drift. The universe is expanding which means you are getting farther away, but also we’re both getting bigger, so maybe that’s okay*. I go through phases of reading religious books & sometimes I think I’m secretly hoping for a conversion. I was reading what radical Catholics were saying about a new papal bull & I honestly felt kind of jealous, imagining myself part of some larger community where everyone feels important enough for god & the devil to pay attention to, instead of just ping-ponging around from one side of the void’s screensaver to the other. I try so hard. It would be nice to know someone was looking.

I was waiting in line at the burger joint up the street watching this absolute unit when the guy who put his order in behind me started tossing bits of small things at the pair of seagulls who hang out in that parking lot. Are they the same seagulls every time? Probably not, but it’s sort of nice to think they are, just putting in their shift at Grant’s, hoping for french fries or maybe a nice pickle. At first I thought he’d started feeding them something & I was enjoying the way their flat webbed feet were thwap-thwap-thwapping across the asphalt to chase whatever it was, but then I realized he was flicking pebbles.

The gulls would chase the pebbles, peck them up off the ground with great abandon, and then stand there with the rocks in their mouth looking puzzled & bereft before letting them drop to the ground. He did it again and again, sort of giggling to himself. They chased after them every time, & I stood there hating this guy who thought it was fun to make them run around for nothing, not even one of the shitty little edge piece french fries that are basically solid shards of potato, just casually making things a little worse for a living being to amuse himself while he waited in line. There are all kinds of ways we justify ordinary cruelty & I don’t think any of them are worth the explanatory breath wasted.

game room

I started a new Animal Crossing island a couple months ago, during one of the more locked down times, and went about befriending villagers & gathering imaginary fruit with great enthuasism. I ran into the same problem I had last time, though—there’s not quite enough going on in the game world for me to want to play every day, but if you don’t play every day your villagers get sad. If you’ve never had a cartoon anteater with strong opinions about fashion look wistfully at you and wonder why you haven’t been around more, I can’t un-recommend it enough. Also, I never figured out how to find my favorite villager from my last island again & things just weren’t the same without her.

This means, of course, I’m back in Stardew Valley for that necessary & pleasantly out-of-the-world feeling. Life in the Valley has several temporal advantages: it progresses according to fixed, internal logic, so your cows will always be approximately where you left them last time and the blackberries ripen on the same day. You can tell just how much people love you by looking at a convenient display of accumulated hearts & convince them to love you more over time in measureable, achievable ways, as opposed to the somewhat opaque affections of Animal Crossing. The inhabitants don’t notice your absences--because they aren't occuring, in game--& if you accidentally offend them you can usually make up the lost ground with a steady flow of cheese and flowers. Now that I’ve written that, I’m realizing it would probably be a pretty effective tactic for wooing me in real life.

one good thing

So one of my favorite things that happens on TikTok is when people take kind of high brow or complicated shit (explaining perspective in paintings, various gender fuckeries) & make it into something beautifully suited for this new medium. This guy is doing pitch perfect Wes Anderson style travel documentaries of Ireland in less than three minutes.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. Write me back at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime may none of your french fries be pebbles.

*ok so i looked up universe expansion as a casual fact-check & while i do not understand it at all, this is definitely not accurate. i’m leaving it in because what am i, a science writer? absolutely not. confidently incorrect here at the DLD or nothing.