Letter

I’ve been tracking packages pretty closely for the past couple years. Ever since I started making my own books, packing and sending have become a regular part of my life. In all that time, I have never seen the tracking activity note MISSENT before. To be completely transparent, this designation appeared in the tracking notes of the company I use to generate labels and pay postage rates, rather than the official USPS site. There, the package has arrived in Manchester, CT as if that’s where it’s supposed to be.

It’s well-documented that the USPS is having a hard time. Between the plague and our berserker ex-president actively trying to kill it, it’s been a rough few years. But this era coincides with my most frequent use of the service. Informed Delivery and USPS Tracking have become my favorite live online role-playing games. I ride vicariously along with my books and paintings as they disappear for weeks at a go into unscannable Bermuda Triangles, appear in western states en route eastbound, and await delivery scans having already been delivered. These are perilous and unpredictable rambles.

I don’t blame individual postal workers——except for that one at the Pilsen post office who told me I had to go to another post office because they were out of international slips; if I can’t mail a package here how are you even a post office?!?——but wish their automated tracking system adopted a more forthcoming, honest nomenclature. For instance, I know for a fact that AWAITING DELIVERY SCAN marked red as if it’s an emergency, actually means the package wasn’t ever on the postal truck that day. Due to staff shortages, USPS will pretend your package is OUT FOR DELIVERY even when it isn’t. Why not mark it WE DON’T KNOW or PLEASE BEAR WITH US DURING THIS DIFFICULT TIME or HOLD TIGHT, WE’RE DOING OUR BEST?

I wonder what brave coder at Pitney Bowes came up with MISSENT? Were they as mystified with USPS Tracking lingo as me and wanting to cut through the bullshit and just tell it how it is? It’s so rare to get a monolith to give a straight answer. MISSENT tells me simply that, sorry, we fucked up and sent your package to the wrong place. I appreciate the candor. These are people, not machines.

Because I’m weird and compulsive, I’m sure I’m making more of this than most of you would. It takes very little for me to get fixated and turn the tunnel-vision on. It’s one of the many reasons I can’t do social media anymore. I’ve got shit to do and scrolling through endless idiotic timelines is a distraction I can no longer afford. Perhaps the attention I pay to the path of these packages scratches the same itch Twitter used to, but at least here there’s a tangible result tied to an actual object I have something to do with, rather some fantasy feud or joke or gossip; all empty calories. Neither is exactly healthy behavior, but I’m doing my best to channel my obsessiveness to at least marginally productive ends.

Maybe USPS could hire me to come up with some truth-in-advertising status updates to ease my mind, as well as the minds of others like me: CHILL, IT’LL GET THERE WHEN IT GETS THERE and, most importantly, GIVE US A FUCKING RAISE.

[I wrote about Christian TeBordo’s new book.]

[It was cool to see Azita play at the Hideout’s first indoor show since before the plague.]

For the past few years——even though I don’t use them to fill prescriptions, and never have, except for when the doctor from the clinic erroneously sends scripts to them——Bienestar Pharmacy, located in the lobby of the place I go for checkups in Pilsen, has texted me a happy birthday message. No one, save for my family, has done so as faithfully.

So you understand, I’m not complaining. If I wanted people I no longer care about to wish me happy birthday every year, I could join Facebook. I think this is true for most people, but birthdays become less and less significant in proportion to how high they pile up. Last year, when I turned fifty, Gene & Georgetti——my favorite Chicago steakhouse——ruined my celebration by deciding to not be open Mondays a couple days before my reservation. That, and the world having a plague, made it a not very festive occasion.

It’s odd to celebrate something you had no say in other than not dying for yet another year. I don’t track who does or doesn’t remember. A few friends text this time and that’s kind of them to do, but if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t think any less of them. Maybe it would be healthier not to acknowledge or mark the date at all. I don’t know.

This year, my birthday falls on a Tuesday, so I get the expensive piece of meat I’d expected in 2020. I eat it alone, which is nothing to be sad about. If it were, I’d be wreck most days. To a large extent, the solitude is by choice.

One table over, a guy who could’ve been in SNL’s Da Bears sketch orders a Grey Goose chilled in a martini glass (but no garnish, because he’s brought his own). So I get dinner and a show for the price of dinner.

If I had a little more self-discipline, I wouldn’t note anything unusual about the date, aside from it being a Tuesday in early fall. But, try as I might, I can’t entirely rid myself of the need to look for meanings in events that have none. No one determines when or where they’re born. I understand why parents, if they like their children, might want to mark these days, but everything else is some kind of societal marketing conspiracy.

I think back to other birthdays. My fortieth was celebrated in the same steakhouse as this year, but in the company of an ex and some friends. My forty-fifth was in NYC at a different steakhouse, with my parents. Moods varied at these and in other years. Pretty even-tempered this time, I’d say. I got booze delivered to my door from my folks and a nice set of vintage Robert Parker paperbacks from a friend, so I have nothing to complain about.

These birthday newsletter posts have become a kind of running joke, at least to me. A reasonable person might ask why, if I hate my birthday so much and care so little about it, why don’t I just shut up about it. And I’d have no valid counter-argument. So I’ll do so.

For at least 364 days…

Win Cloud changed my life without even quickening his breath. When I was sixteen, my father signed me up for a figure drawing class. It met Wednesday evenings on one of the upper floors of the student union on the campus of the university where my father worked. Every other student taught or went to school there, making me by far the youngest.

I don’t know how many unclothed women I’d seen in my life in person up until this class, but it wouldn’t be an impressive number. What I knew best about the female form came from looking at paintings and drawings. My parents dragged me to museums all my life. I hated it but something of the reckoning with bodies on a flat surface stuck. I’ve made my own sorry attempts ever since I can remember.

There were some art teachers before Win but few would have a bigger impact. Especially considering how little he taught outwardly. His method was near-silent osmosis. He’d saunter around the room now and then, offering occasional advice or correction, but for most of the two-hour duration, he was at his own easel, making muscular, effortless-seeming, rhythmic gesture drawings. Sometimes he’d add a wash to accentuate the direction of the light or a fold of flesh. He drew with his whole arm, the rest of his body bending along gracefully to the mark created by the stub of charcoal held loose in his hand. It was like Tai Chi but with a visible record of each motion. The naked woman on the stand in the middle of the room was a pretext for this series of body movements. The rest of us were like uncoordinated bumblers by comparison. But you wouldn’t know it by how Win treated us.

He made everyone in that room feel like a colleague, a fellow student of a subject that could never be truly mastered. Because art for the artist is a way of being rather than a means to an end or a series of technical tricks to overcome. What Win communicated without a word was the engulfing flow of engaging with the world by making marks in reaction to what it threw at you.

From the first hour in that room, I sensed I’d be doing what I did there for the rest of my life. And it turned out to be so.

One time, a couple years back, sitting in a booth at the Albatross, Carey told me about a beautiful woman he was with when he was young. She was wild and free and almost as beautiful as he thought he was back then. She got him hooked on smack and her father hated his guts. Her name was Nika Cloud. It took me some time to put it together and I never told Carey about the connection. I didn’t want him talking shit about a guy that mattered to me. Also, it felt good to know something he didn’t. Because he knew everything. All you had to do was ask.

Win never talked about his family. I didn’t even know about the aikido thing, but when Carey said it, it clicked everything into place. The way the man moved was right out of those old kung fu epics. He’d glide, seeming to barely touch the linoleum beneath his black slippers. Carey went on and on about how perfect Win’s daughter’s ass was. He had a talent for making anything beautiful ugly. He blamed her for making him a junkie and said she stepped out on him with every other swinging dick in the scene. As he was going on and on, I wondered what Win would be like as a father. Did he live with Nika’s mother? Was he in his daughter’s life at all?

I went on Instagram and found her. Thirty years after the time Carey knew her, she was still stunning. In her timeline were pictures of farmer’s markets, flowers, and a couple children bearing her unmistakable genetic trace. Way down the scroll, Nika posted several of her father’s paintings. Then a post announcing his passing.

After the class, I didn’t keep in touch with Win. I didn’t know yet that’s a thing you could do. That some of your teachers would be happy to become your friends. I don’t know if Win would have wanted that, but seeing him smiling in cropped Instagram snapshots made me regret not trying.

The drawings I made in his class got me into art school. I still catch a life-drawing session when I can find one. It’s like going back to the rudiments, the source. Win showed me how to lay the foundation for everything I made after. Without those easy charcoal marks, I couldn’t have made a thing worth a second look.

Maybe if Carey had taken Win’s class he wouldn’t be such an asshole. Probably not though.

At the very least, he might have learned how to draw.

****

{Was interviewed on the Selected Prose show.}

{Made a new collage book.}

{Wrote about the new bookstore coming to my neighborhood.}