Ink runs

from the corners of my mouth

Sometimes I wonder what my childhood would have been like with the internet. I’m a person who needs near-constant activity, who seeks it out through story-writing, book-reading, quilt-making, cooking, reimagining room layouts. Would I have just disappeared into online worlds? I’m glad I’ll never find out.

As a kid, to keep busy I wrote letters. I was prolific. I had friends everywhere, thanks to a parental inclination to move frequently, but I also sent letters to my friends in the same city. If it could go into an envelope with a stamp, I mailed it.¹

Sometimes I never heard back. Those who did reply, though, received returns quickly. Some friends and I had special ways of decorating our envelopes to each other, and often letters had taped bits of things in them. We experimented with pens and handwriting, tried various papers, sprayed perfumes on them, and generally entertained ourselves immensely.

Also, I kept every letter I received. EVERY letter.² I hauled those things around with me in boxes for years, organized into large envelopes by time period. Then one day in my 30s, I decided I needed to purge. But I couldn’t throw them away! So, and this might be the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, I mailed those letters back to the senders. Decades after they’d sent them to me.

You wanted it if you didn’t have one: the BIC four-color retractable ballpoint. Classic.

Nobody writes anymore because of email and social media. But still! I love writing, of paper, of the idea of writing things down on paper. To this day I feel giddy upon entering a stationery shop. I so enjoy trying out different markers on the practice pads they make available so people don’t mark up the price tags to see how a pen feels.

My 2024 intentions included one to send birthday cards to friends, to plan for it and not send late, haphazard greetings. So earlier in April, I sent a card to a childhood friend who used to be one of my BFFs. We wrote tons of letters back and forth. We especially bonded over music — she had an eclectic taste influenced by her cool older brother, and I generally liked her preferences. She also wore rad hats to school and kicked ass in soccer and nobody messed with her. A few days ago I received a note back from her, in the mail, handwritten on a card, saying…want to start this up again? Most definitely, yes.

Actual handwritten letter from a friend, April 2024

I’m going to age away from screens and back into paper. My fingers will again feel the slice and sting of a paper cut, no doubt, and I may have to hunt for stamps. I’ll send so many letters I’ll have to invest in the USPS. And then one day when I’m 97, someone will find me mummified under a mountain of letters received, purple and green gel pens stuffed in all my pockets for use in the next world, ink staining my papery-skinned fingers, and forever stamps dangling in my white hair like jewels to decorate me in the afterlife.

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Meanwhile, in back in Nerdville, the other day I went to Staples to buy a label maker³ because I have a recording trip to Fort Peck coming up. I have two sets of lavalier mics, one belonging Chickadee (the nonprofit I direct), and the other to MTDA where I work. The sets look similar but aren’t interchangeable, so I needed to label them. Look at the leveled-up shit I produced.⁴ Then I labeled a bunch of binders and I am sure I’ll find some shelves or jars to label next. The whole enterprise is a slippery slope. Next thing you know I’ll be slobbering down the label maker aisle trying to find the exact cartridges to label my stationery sets and BIC pens and piles of letters I’m about to start receiving.

Amped up labeling

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man. 
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-Mark Strand

1. Side note, many kids these days don’t even know how to address an envelope. I know this as a fact.

2. I mean personal letters, not shit from the bank or whatever.

3. after making Seinfeld jokes to friends, because nobody ever answered the question of whether Seinfeld imitated life or life imitated Seinfeld.

4. I listened to U2 and The Cure while I did it, too. Take that, Millennials.