Dead Letter Department #51
weather report
There was a sunny day this past weekend and the skies seemed to crack open at the pink dawn & stay that way all day, big tufts of cloud sweeping over the blue curve. I was out & about much of the day, mostly doing errands but also making a futile pass at an estate sale up in Barkley hills. It wasn’t much of a sale by the time I got there, but it looked like it had been a wonderful life. Sometimes houses seem full of the person who’s just died, their thoughts, their shoes, their recipe books—ghosts, I guess you could call them, although I don’t think it’s the recently dead hanging around in an ectoplasmic fitted sheet. It’s more just the feeling that a life leaves behind, the traces of how they moved. ‘World traveler,’ the ad for the sale read, ‘tons of hobby equipment,’ which already seems like a great start to me, who has been absolutely nowhere & is currently trying to adopt some hobbies that don’t involve screens or the constant infusion of narrative directly into my veins.
Part of it is acquisitive, of course—I love finding something I’ve been hoping to add to my apartment but couldn’t afford otherwise—but part of it is the joy of being outside the world of box stores & online shopping. Mysterious items, whose provenance I will never be able to identify, pieces that aren’t made any more, bits and bobs that have someone else’s history all over them. I know the algorithms are supposed to recreate the process of discovery, to some degree, but I almost never find something that clicks for me on those lists of ‘You Might Also Enjoy,’ & sometimes it just sends me down a mental rabbit hole of what weird online choices I must have made to get things so irrelevant to my actual interests. One social media platform, for example, thinks that I speak Portuguese & have schizophrenia, so I’m constantly getting ads for various mental health programs that aren’t terribly relevant, interspersed with ads I don’t even understand, because I definitely don’t speak any Portuguese.
The little typewriter that I picked up for twenty bucks at a sale the other day turns out to be the same model that Cormac McCarthy has used for all his books. I’m not exactly a Cormac McCarthy stan, having been traumatized by reading The Road & also foolishly watching the movie, at the insistence of my friend’s ex-boyfriend, but he is certainly a productive writer & it feels like a good omen. The new ribbons are in the mail, so maybe those of you in the Secret Dead Letter Department will be getting typed missives sometime soon.
It doesn’t seem possible that we’re already almost three weeks into 2023. The feeling of a reset lingers, a haze of possibility hanging over everything, the equivalent of the first few pages of a fresh notebook before I accidentally rip out three pages & dunk it in ketchup, when I still believe this is going to be the time I’ll be neat & legible & organized.
I was taking some bags to the art thrift store downtown for my mom the other day (Allied Arts, if you haven’t been—they have a very cool exhibit right now of watercolors & ceramics) when a guy coming the other way down the street stopped me.
“You live here, right? In this town?” he said. “Can I ask you something?”
I said yes, a little uncertainly—he had a very intense gaze, and huge, bright blue eyes.
“Well, I think the young people these days are getting very rude,” he announced.
I was immediately curious about his internal taxonomy. Was he only interested in telling me about the rudeness if I also lived in town? Would I have gotten a different complaint if I was from somewhere else or nothing at all? We were already too far from that decision branch to ever know, but I didn’t want to agree, because I have, in fact, not noticed the young people getting very rude.
“Are they?” I said, in a tone of polite inquiry. “I don’t think I’ve noticed that.”
He then launched into a somewhat complicated story I didn’t entirely follow about having to clear his throat in the street & a (presumably) young person telling him that the police were going to be able to examine his genetic material from what he’d left behind. “I said to him that wasn’t possible,” he told me, sounding increasingly distressed. “There wouldn’t be anything left by then.”
“That doesn’t sound possible to me either,” I said. “And it was really odd of him to tell you that.”
The man’s shoulders immediately relaxed. “That’s what I think!”
“Really odd,” I repeated, because I didn’t want him to worry, although I wondered, in a slightly panicked way, where else the conversation might go.
He just fixed me with those bright blue eyes again, said, “Thank you for your time! Have a good day,” and onward he marched.
I think he just wanted a quick vibe check on the whole genetic material business, & I happened to be the nearest person available with a face that suggested I was available for conversation, which I definitely was.
one good thing
I’ve been craving a cheeseburger ever since I saw the Menu & I finally made it happen—a Dairy Queen bacon cheeseburger, eaten as soon as possible after buying it, right there in the car, in the parking lot of the closest park, directly out of the little paper box. It was just what I wanted—the savory juices, the bite of the onion, a thick slice of tomato bursting into a mess inside the bun, two kinds of cheese smothering it all. It was extremely messy—I probably still have a bit of grease on the thigh of my jeans—& absolutely the most satisfying thing I’ve eaten in ages. I can’t wait to do it again, so anytime you want to go get a cheeseburger with me, just say the word—I’d stand up from my desk right now & hop in the car with you.
If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing about transition & shifting identity. You can write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may a stranger have a reassuring word for you when you need it.