Dead Letter Department #78
dead letters i am unlikely to write
a eulogy for the plastic canister i’ve had since i moved into this apartment, the one with the melted divot on the side, which having held every kind of baking supply and tea imaginable, has finally given up on the firm elasticity required of its rubbery gasket, and now must be consigned to the burial heap of the garbage can
10k words of Our Flag Means Death fan fiction in which Izzy Hands & Wee John fall in love, & instead of [spoilers for the end of Season 2], they live happily ever after, doing each other’s eyeliner & wearing increasingly ornate knitted garments
micro-local investigative reporting, with such subjects as What’s The Deal With That House By The Rotary With All the Xmas Decorations, Running Guy: Where Does He Go When He’s Not Running?, Seagull Lady: Her Backstory (Where Does She Get All That Bread), etc
an essay about trying to figure out how to be friendly without seeming like a total fucking creep, esp. with younger people, now that i am a middle-aged man, when i have spent my whole life watching middle-aged men be huge weirdos in public & vividly recall what it was like trying to ascertain whether i was about to Have a A Real Bad One at work with any given dude
why the Pilot Precise V5 Rollerball Pens, Extra Fine Point in black is my one true pen
on new age cult documentaries, and how they often end up hitting such similar beats, through wildly different tactics: in this unimaginably vast spread of humanity, and this painfully broken world, we are the chosen few who will bring about change—not through any sort of labor or engagement with real, complicated people, crucially, but through something that just happens to be the kind of thing we excel at and enjoy. this change will be not incremental but more of a cinematic montage, and also, guess what, we are immune to death! literally everyone else ever has the wrong handle on it, & if you get on our side, the side of right, you will never have to grapple with mortality in any real way because it won’t exist anymore! you don’t have to worry about being a person in the ordinary way, because you’re not really a person, you are a [whatever the cult vocabulary is]
a villanelle about the bugs that get in between the glass & the screen at the very end of fall and flap terribly against the metal grid for the last few days of their lives—probably living a little longer in the leaking warmth of the house, maybe even a lot longer, given bug lifespans, but at what cost?
10 ways to use up a Costco rotisserie chicken
the best genres of magazine articles for brushing your teeth to, subsets for morning (energy building) & evening (decompression)
how i messed up my TikTok algorithm again—I’ve been getting a lot of marital content, plus advice on how to marry a rich man in Dubai, so it’s probably time to stick to my Following page for a while & see if I can get it to reset back to queer creators, marine biologists, & people finding big mushrooms in the woods
a ranking of Haggen deli items on two vectors: deliciousness/nutritiousness & emotional satiation
reviews of the pixellated games I’ve been playing, all of which are more than 10 years old, including a farming game, a foraging game, and a game in which you are a medieval graveyard keeper & have to learn how to bury, burn & resurrect bodies
long overdue goodbyes: the slightly melancholic end of an era feeling that i’ll probably be greatly paring back the Why Are You Like This CD mailing since so few people have CD players in their cars anymore, & it is silly of me to spend money on postage for what is essentially a tracklist & an inconvenient coaster, even if people like getting them as an object
glasses wipes reviews
why the northside Bean Stop drive-through is superior to the Sehome Bean Stop drive-through, a cutting exposé
a defense of my to read pile, tottering by my desk as i write this to you, with a full explanation of the importance of reading the right book at the right moment, and the need for variety (i.e., library books vs loaned vs purchased, all with slightly different flavors as as result)
a love letter to other people’s work spaces: nothing i like more than photos of desks, studios, garages, preferably messy, showing me a little glimpse of how they make work
Pete Walker vs Bessel van der Kolk, or as E. said, would your children agree to be be photographed in a beret with you or not?
the pleasure of having missed the window to get a mammogram by approximately one year, & knowing i don’t ever have to fucking do that
a longer screed about how social media scratches various itches in my brain, & can be inspirational, informative, useful, but if i’m not engaging with it in that way, it just all becomes lightly to moderately depressing but somehow still entrenched in habit in such a way that i’m constantly battling to stay on top of the barrel as it floats down the river
with those expunged, if there’s anything you’d like me to write about, you can always email & tell me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you have more good ideas than bad, even if it’s by a slim margin.