Friday, October 30, 2009

You've Got Mail

I think for our purposes this post would be more aptly titled You had mail, but more on that later.

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"

Did you know the Mailman/Mail Persons creed was not created by a mail carrier? It was in fact created by a Greek Historian in reference to Ancient Persian Couriers. It is confused as being the official creed because it is inscribed at The James Farley Post Office in New York City.

I know this because I wrote a paper about mail carriers in the 6th grade; I assure you it was wonderfully boring. I choose to write it because I was really impressed by the mail, a letter I wrote in California could get anywhere in the world for a quarter, that was the postage back then. Language, Political Beliefs, Nationality, Color, Religion, and Geography were no match for the power of the mail. It is an impressive idea if you think about.

Mail operates on a few simple premises: 1 You have to write where it's going on the outside, optionally where it came from, 2 You must pay a small fee for the services, 3 Trust. Trust is the crux of the mail system, a mailbox is not a fortress or a vault, it is an object that by and large sits in front of our houses unprotected and unwatched. Despite the lack of security surrounding most mailboxes we still send, money, gifts, personal, and sensitive information, hopes, dreams, and so on and so forth by the mail. This sounds very risky, but governments around the globe enacted very strict laws to protect mail from tampering theft and fraud. These actions are to ensure trust, everyday people put out mail mostly without fear because as a society I guess we have all agreed the mail is something you don't mess with. Everyone has to send mail at some point, so for the most part mail is safe. This is not to say that people haven't screwed with the mail, of course they have but then again if they got caught they faced time in a federal prison. Pretty harsh but it enable us to have the communal trust that the mail relies on.

Now having said all that I will attempt to justify mail theft to you.

Thursday night came and went, as did Friday morning and afternoon, my boredom continued. I was starting to get really anxious I needed to stretch my legs. I dressed myself all in black, waited for nightfall then I was off. Still on my kick about dogs I decided to check some of the surrounding back yards to see if I could find any. No luck on the dog front so after about 7 houses I decided it might be time to raid another pantry. I had cleaned out Jim Stanley, Aaron's neighbor to the east, so I decided Carol Barnard and Family, Aaron's neighbor to the west, would be my next stop. When I approached the front door I noticed a package on the front step and that her mail box, which is attached to the front of her house, was over-flowing. I don't know what possessed me, but I took the package and all of her mail. I never even went in, I took it all directly back to the basement and started opening it. The Barnard Family must have been on vacation because they had a lot of mail. The package was an eBay item from seller Your-Secret-Identity to eBay member DarthMaulsLowerHalf. Inside the box was two Star Wars figures Ponda Baba, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Pushing aside the package I moved onto the mail. Most of the mail was junk, fliers, advertisements, coupon books, and supermarket ads. The portion that wasn't junk mail consisted of two past due credit card bills, one to Capital One for $19.78, not to bad, and the other for a Victoria Secrets card with a balance of $310.11.

I guess Carol had a thing for nice undies. Looking at her it is not something you would have guessed. She was your average middle-aged woman, probably on the wrong end of 45. She wore plain almost dumpy clothes, and was a bit overweight but not much. I had spoken with her several times mostly just a polite "Hello" as I pulled up to Aaron's, but I had talked at length with her at few of the numerous block parties the neighborhood use to throw. All of these homes are in a cult-de-sac and everyone just kind of knows each other. The Hoovers live on the corner. The Truwater’s live in the biggest bluest house on the block because Sam is a richy rich lawyer. The Washington’s live in the red house, and so on and so forth, I don't even live on this street and I know everyone’s business. Elm Ct is just that kind of street, strangely communal, almost a throw back to the 50's with the men mowing the lawns on Saturday afternoons, women baking, and welcome to the neighborhood parties with people just popping by to introduce themselves. It was nice, I think what I liked best was really the annual 4th of July block party, because everyone would get together and chip in for fire works then we would all kind of sit around eating and drinking and trying not to blow ourselves up while all the neighborhood kids watched. Those were good times.

The rest of the mail consisted of a water, cable, and cell phone bill, an appointment reminder for marriage counseling, and a speeding ticket, addressed to carol's daughter Jenny who left for U.C. Berkley last year.

Reading that mail, even though it wasn't mine, made me feel so normal. Mail is so ordinary and consistent. If you get mail you exist, it is as simple as that. It doesn't matter what you get in the mail or who sent it, the simple act of receiving mail proves it. Someone somewhere acknowledges that you in fact are real, and the fact that you received it means you also accept that they are real. If that sounds crazy, then let me bring up Santa Claus.... I know how that last statement sounds, but bear with me just a moment longer.

As a child you believe in Santa, and that he brings gifts every Christmas. Santa knows your toy preference because you sent him a letter. If Santa wasn't real then he couldn't very well receive a letter, even children accept this as a fact. This carefully perpetrated lie hinges on the very notion that mail some how equals existence.

Hopefully I now sound a bit less off the deep end. Anyway, back to what happened. After reading all of mail, I soon went upstairs and outside looking for Aaron and Aprils mail. Whatever is happening out there has had me feeling very close to the frayed ends of sanity, the boundary between unreality and reality feels incredible thin. I keep feeling like I might wake up soon, or wondering if maybe on my way to target I was in a car accident and this is what a coma is. I also imagine that maybe I have died, because the very concrete rules of society have seemed to have eroded rather quickly. The simplest things in my life went away before I realized they were gone, so if the simple act of stealing some mail can help me pull back a few steps from the brink I think its worth it, societal taboo be damned.

So is my theft justified? Have I crossed a line breaking the great trust of the mail? Is this an obsolete societal taboo now that society has up and left? Is my theft justified? You decide, it will be dark in 20 mins and I want to gather the rest of the mail on the street.


Tranquilnow@gmail.com
~Johnny~
Like a Thief in the Night