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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.