It's in the Mail

A hundred years ago the mail carriers working out of New York's main Post Office made nine deliveries a day, six days a week. Nearly three thousand opportunities each year for something unexpected to make its way into your mailbox.

Twenty years ago I was active in some Mail Art circles. I have hundreds of things sent to me from around the world, and others probably still have some of what I sent (I recently learned that the MOMA library actually does). But I gradually moved on to other things.

Six months from now the United States Postal Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays, dropping to five deliveries each week, and it's difficult to find anyone who cares. Even I don't really care. There's rarely anything in the mail that's worth opening.

So I'll give my old friend postal mail one last hurrah, with an offer to you: reply to this message with your postal address -- PO Box, office, home, I couldn't care less -- and I'll send you something in the mail. If you're lucky, and quick, you might even get it on a Saturday.

For those who choose to take me up on this: I don't know what I'll send you, nor can I predict how long it will take for me to make my way through the list of people who respond to this offer, but sooner or later something will come.

Keep an eye out for it.


whitneymcn
thelistserve[AT]absono.us
Brooklyn

Comments

Post a Comment

Favorites

This is a puzzle.

Beyond this message a challenge awaits; In the listserve, no links are allowed, what a cruel fate! The first clue must be deciphered by ROT 8. . Let me know and just email if your brain needs a spark Your first clue is just after this punctuation mark / dsoqwj vwxwfvafy lge jgtafkgf af lg cadd s egucafytajv Listserve Puzzle listservepuzzle[AT]gmail.com
Read more

21,612 is a lot

Hi, everyone. I'm a teenaged girl. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I know much about the world. I'm 18, a freshman in college, and I struggle every day trying to see into the future: into what might be, where I might go. Recently I've decided that my destiny in life is to be a high-school biology teacher, but ask me again later and perhaps that will have changed. One thing I feel passionate about is body modification. Somehow my standards of beauty have developed in a way that put piercings, tattoos, implants and scarification at the forefront. However, my parents have threatened to cut off their funding for my education if I modify myself in any way. I already have piercings, and though my family will never see them due to their private locations, I would love to be able to share this important part of my life with them and express myself through modification in a more public way. Essentially, they have rejected my lifestyle, and through this, they have ...
Read more

Tiny wings

Hi all, I want to write about a subject that is very close to my heart - bees! I started bee keeping last year, and have two colonies right now. These two already managed to supply my family and my friends with more than enough honey, and keeping the bees is a tremendously satisfying activity. They smell so good, and are very tidy animals, and are just very, very interesting overall. The insects' way of dealing with the world is just so very different from how we as mammals approach it - it seems almost alien. Anyways, what is probably most impressive is the workload these little animals deal with. For one kilo of honey, they visit 4 million flowers, and fly a distance equivalent of more than 4 times around the earth. Think about that for a second. And then, if you start to think about how they "furniture" their housing themselves by the wax they sweat out, how they can control temperature inside the hive to the tenth of a degree, how they collectively make decisions i...
Read more