Letter

I bartered a portrait of Katherine Mansfield for an iPhone 7. It will live in my desk drawer, except for times I need to Square-read your credit card. It happened because a reader of this newsletter read about my struggles at Printers Row processing credit card sales. I wish I could fund my whole life through barter. Cut out not only the middlemen, women, and children, but also all currency other than the kind I can make myself. What a world that would be.

I was on the radio the other day and the host asked how I get by off my art. I told him about having to humble myself and accept commissions and other art-adjacent gigs that would have horrified the younger me.

Now I spend a significant chunk of my days painting and drawing people, animals, and places I would have never chosen or even imagined choosing on my own. It’s actually a good thing and probably has an effect on my “real” work.

One of the current jobs is a series of twelve paintings marking the high points of a guy’s relationship with his girlfriend. He plans to give the pictures to her for Christmas. The photos he sends me to use as reference show places I’d never go. A lot of remote nature scenes, alternating with vacation good-time beach/golf/resort spots.

I don’t know that I can pinpoint what I think about as I work on these things. Maybe it’s mostly formal/visual concerns. Solving compositional problems. There’s likely more too it. But it ain’t envy or even curiosity.

I don’t want to go to the beautiful places or have the good times. I don’t know why people go there or do that. But all these years of looking and painting have taught me how to portray beings and locations I have nothing to do with. It’s a strange thing to find out. I used to think I could only make art out of what mattered to me. Not anymore.

And now, if you see me on the street and want to give me virtual money to paint a memorial portrait of your beloved hamster in an exotic locale, I can accept your payment on the spot. Thank Katherine Mansfield——a writer I haven’t even read.

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…