My family and I have been preparing for a camping trip. We’re stocking up on supplies, and just bought a roundtrip plane ticket for our son in college so he can join us.

Here’s a recent photo of where we’ve been planning to go.

We’re now scouting out alternative locations.

I’ve complained lots of times in my life about the post office (and if you know me, you know my favorite sobriquet for the service is the Post Awful). Why? Because, obviously, I love it. I have eagerly awaited the mail every delivery day of my life as long as I can remember. I remember the thrill at age 10 of getting the latest jiffy pack of vintage comics ordered from comics dealer Robert Bell delivered to my door in southern New Jersey from the impossibly distant Hauppauge, NY. (And can still remember specifically one of the comics received that way, Fantastic Four #54.) I discovered RBCC (Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector) in an ad in Marvel comics, thereafter receiving that magazine in the mail. That introduced me to all of fandom, and to several important close relationships, and to publishing my own fanzines, and to getting paid to appear in print. And how did I get paid? Most of my life, right up to this point, it’s been through the mail. The same as my father, who also haunted the mailbox.

So:  just so you know, all my complaints about the post office are those of a lover who has discovered romance and expects it to be as deeply fulfilling every time as it once was. I’m excited to arrive home and find that either The New Yorker or a comic book has  arrived in the mail, and I’m disappointed when it hasn’t. It’s a misplaced disappointment — the post office has nothing to do with publishing timetables — but love doesn’t truckle with reason.

What brings this on is a depressing exchange I had recently with a good friend. Depressing because I found myself confessing at length that I had no use for first-class stamps, no matter how attractive and perfectly suited to my own interests. My rational side explained the situation; my emotional side was revulsed by my own argument. What occasioned this was yet another plea from my friend to go out and buy some of those cool first-class stamps that the post office is now constantly issuing (in the hopes of boosting sales). Yes, I bought a pane of the DC comics stamps and admired their beauty. Yes, I bought a pane of the Marvel comics stamps (although I was puzzled by the choice of some of the characters depicted). But in each case I then found I had no use for them. So when my friend recommended buying the new stamps of classic TV stars, here was my unfortunately smartass reply:

Please let me know how to load these into the Pitney Bowes machine at my office. ‘Cause I would love to be printing these out on statements, payments, etc. (Which provides the entirety of my outgoing first-class mail.)

Yeah, nice, huh? Not my proudest moment. For 30 years and more, it has been hard to drub out the unfortunate early influence of reading so much Harlan Ellison; it pains me to see it there again, and deployed on a friend.

My even-tempered (and revered) good friend responded this way:

Lee, Those stamps are for when you send love notes, birthday cards, or words of wisdom.  The artistical postage adds immeasurably to the effectualness.

Yes. And then here was my response, which included other friends by now on this thread:

Love notes don’t require postage. If they’re to my wife, they’re distributed here at  home. (If they were to someone else, I doubt I’d want my return address, or other proof of origin, so they wouldn’t be mailed.)

I don’t send birthday cards. Did anyone on this email get one? I think not.

Words of wisdom. Well, as proved with this communication, I send these electronically. (In this way, or on my blog.) [Note:  this is more of that Ellison influence.]

As we all know, I love the mail. And I — I! — barely use it. I like the idea of trains, too, but other than subways, I haven’t ridden a train in about 10 years. And then it was too slow and too costly. (This, however, is a US problem. The trains in Europe are remarkable — inexpensive, fast and convenient.) I think the roundtrip from Los Angeles to San Diego on the Sunliner, with restricted hours, and requiring leaving one’s car somewhere, is almost $100. For that, I’ll drive the 125 miles each way.

The one non-business first-class communication I do still send — the sympathy card — I can’t imagine adding a Simpsons stamp to.

I bought a pane of those Marvel comics stamps and found I had almost no use for them. When postage went up, I was still trying to use them — and now had to buy “helper” stamps.

Sorry. I like the idea of them, but stamps are a utilitarian product, and for me at least, they no longer have any utility.

Feeling sad,

Lee

So there it is. I am one of the people killing the post office. And I love the post office — and am willing to admit it this once. This is merely the latest of my ungrateful crimes:

• I love newspapers, but I’m not buying them
• I love books, but don’t go to bookstores
• I love music, but don’t go to music stores
• I love my community, but I buy almost all non-grocery items online

When was the last time I mailed a letter? I can’t remember. Worse, I haven’t gotten around to reading the last one I received (!). As someone who believes in personal responsibility, its flip side must hold true, so I don’t believe in suffering free-floating guilt. I wish people weren’t getting massacred all over the globe, and I’d like to fix that somehow, but because I’m not doing the killing myself, I don’t feel guilty. With these other, smaller, matters I am partly culpable. But in a society in which convenience, formerly costly, has also become cheaper, in which the digital download of intellectual property is faster and less expensive and less polluting than the physical object, I don’t hold out any hope for the tangible future of books or newspapers or music or stamps. Feeling bad won’t change that.

• A nice piece on the 10th-anniversary release of Takashi Miike’s “Audition.” Don’t read the story if you haven’t seen the film. But do see the film, and try to be utterly unprepared.
• A somewhat useless overview of Joel and Ethan Coen’s oeuvre. The online headline:  “Just accept the mystery.” (In the print version:  “Mystery in the making.”) To headline a piece “Just accept the mystery” is to say, “I don’t know what to make of this.” Which begs the question:  then why write about it? (And yes, before you email me, I realize that an editor headlined it.)
• Douglas Brinkley reviews the new Clinton presidency book, Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes,” and decides that “our country benefited from his robust leadership.” Which makes me pause to wonder if he hasn’t slid from book reviewer to partisan advocate. An interview with the author by NPR’s Terry Gross coincided more closely with my own remembrance:  some real accomplishments, matched with a dogged determination to filter everything through the prism of personal crisis — the president’s own. If Clinton was, to use Brinkley’s assertion, a “political genius and a dazzling player with cunning pragmatism and spot-on observations,” why didn’t his mirror ever tell him how Monica Lewinsky and Jennifer Flowers and Whitewater and Lincoln Bedroom donations and lying under oath and on and on would be used against him to the detriment of us all? This doesn’t sound like “robust leadership.” It sounds like Shakespearean tragedy.
• Finally, the California section — now slimmed down and appearing only once a week like a diminished doppelganger of its namesake — carries a story about the success of San Francisco’s city-run universal health care effort. This is typical of the smart effective program’s the city has seen under Mayor Gavin Newsom, and reflect why I’m supporting him for governor.

How Star Trek effects used to be done — with papier mache and masonite.

Today’s LA Times features a full-page sales ad from Borders, one of the surviving chains offering books, music, coffee, and other things aimed at people who like books, music, and coffee. The sales ad promotes “educator appreciation week!” (Exclamation point theirs.) “Current and retired educators save on purchases for personal or classroom use.” Cool.

That discount equals “30% off list price of almost everything!*” (Asterisk theirs.)

So of course my eye tracked down to the spot the asterisk points to. In type so small that I doubt most book readers can read it, I found this:

Yes, it’s too small for my iPhone to capture it well either. Here’s what it says:  “…Excludes previous and online purchases, special orders, gift cards, newspapers, magazines, comics, coupon books, eBooks, digital downloads, self-publishing programs, Smartbox products, Rosetta Stone software, shipping, and all electronics, including but not limited to the Sony Reader and the Zune. Also excludes all Dean & DeLuca and Starbucks cafe items and products….”

I count at least 17 product categories excluded above.  So… what does “almost” mean?

The link to our previous listing seems to have been rendered inoperable. We will keep you apprised of this exciting opportunity.

Business for sale.

Famous public school located in scenic Los Angeles seeks new operator. Situation presents great business opportunity for right operator. Estimated annual revenue of $27.6 million with simplified accounts receivable. (Single large client supplies all revenue.)  New management strategies, customer-service processes, and the right rebranding could yield significant results. Success will require a nuanced communications strategy with local customer base and key stakeholders. Current management unlikely to provide transition assistance.

Last week, Pere Ubu guru David Thomas kindly emailed me to say he’d make sure that I got the new Ubu disk, as well as the recent CD he produced for 15-60-75 (the Numbers band), in the mail.

The Numbers’ disk arrived two days ago and I’ve just started to explore its deep soulful blues.

Today in my mail, there was the new Pere Ubu disk. In a hand-addressed bubble mailer. With the hand-written return address of… Steve Mehlman, the drummer.

This has just gotten better and better.

 By way of reminder, here are some of the things I’ve written in the past about John Edwards:

• “…a hypocritical ambulance-chaser of the first order“
• I compared an ingratiating telephone fundraiser as a “honey-voiced southerner… who does her best to ingratiate herself with fellow good ol’ folks. (In other words, John Edwards, with fewer $400 haircuts.)
• a “charlatan” who “used his wife’s cancer as the backdrop for [his] first campaign video while [he was] booking ‘consulting time’ with another woman.

Edwards’ checkered history leads me to ask, as a reporter for Newsweek did today, why he is still raising — and spending — money on a presidential campaign. Last I checked, that race was held almost a year ago (and Edwards wasn’t in it). But somehow he has banked $3.7 million in donations and continues to spend it.

I have known many public servants in my life. The vast majority of them work long hours in enormously frustrating situations in service to ideals they hold close to their hearts, striving to make a better life for people. Every time you confront cynicism about politics and government, it’s not because of those people — it’s because of people like John Edwards, a self-aggrandizing phony who preys off people’s misery.