Letter

I get a curious email from a man named Artis. He’s writing on behalf of the United States Postal Service. It isn’t to ask me to stop harassing the post office about delayed or lost packages, as I would have surmised. He’s inviting me to take part in the unveiling of the first-ever stamp featuring the work of Shel Silverstein. It’s an offer I can’t refuse.

The morning of the ceremony, I wander around a rainy Logan Square, looking for a place to eat. I settle on Lula Cafe. I’ve been going there over twenty years, back to when it was a crummy coffee shop called Logan Beach Cafe. Silverstein may even still have been alive then. Though he was long gone from the neighborhood and Chicago.

Darwin Elementary, where Silverstein was once a student, is a few blocks from Lula. I try every red door and find each locked, until I circle the entire building to the parking lot. There, a sandwich board announces the stamp ceremony. I push a buzzer and go inside. I’m shuttled into a holding area serving as a green room. A spread of Dunkin’ Donuts and cubed fruit sits on a side table for the taking. All us dignitaries are introduced and informed about the schedule of events.

We proceed to the school auditorium stage and take our seats. Our MC, Don Evans, welcomes a very tall and skinny letter carrier to the stage to sing the national anthem. There’s also a color guard, remarks from school and postal officials, and recitals of Silverstein poems by students. Some read confidently, while others are barely audible; one kid is so nervous as he waits his turn that he’s trembling and crying. The principal—who looks young enough to be a student himself—ushers the poor kid off stage before this episode can become a lifelong traumatic memory.

Then Don introduces me. This is more or less what I say:

This new stamp is special to me because stamps were one of my first influences as an artist. A Shel Silverstein stamp is a no-brainer.

Like many of the best writers, Shel Silverstein could share complex ideas with simple words. He knew how not to drone on or overstay his welcome. He didn’t waste time or space when he didn’t have to. This is one of the many reasons why his work continues to be loved by so many of us.

I was seven years old when my family moved to this country from the Soviet Union, so I didn’t grow up with Silverstein’s pictures and words. Those first few years I was just learning the language rather than enjoying its more nimble practitioners. My bedtime stories were in Russian. Nevertheless I was predisposed to appreciate Silverstein’s type of poetry because in the Soviet Union many of the best writers found their only means of expression through children’s literature. His wit, playfulness and melancholy were felt instantly familiar. As if I’d always known them. Like Kharms, Marshak, and so many other writers both here and in the USSR, Silverstein never set out to write for children. He worked for Playboy and wrote raunchy songs for rock bands.

He only turned to art and writing at all once it became clear he wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for his beloved White Sox.

Though he did sell hotdogs at Comiskey for a time.

A few years back, in a bar on the North Side, I heard an essay read out loud offering yet another interpretation of The Giving Tree. I’d be willing to wager that the number of interpretations of that book now outnumber its total word-count.

That’s as telling a tribute to Silverstein’s genius as any. His carefully chosen, precise words continue to inspire millions of readers and will continue to do so as long as there are readers and books.

Silverstein tells us with humor and wisdom what it’s like to be a particular person. To be unlike anyone else. 

I’ll leave with you the man’s own words:

My skin is kind of sort of brownish

Pinkish yellowish white.

My eyes are greyish blueish green,

But I’m told they look orange in the night.

My hair is reddish blondish brown,

But it’s silver when it’s wet.

And all the colors I am inside

Have not been invented yet.

We all sign programs for audience members a few minutes, sitting behind a table hastily set up onstage. I like the little kids passing through who push whatever random paperwork they’re holding at one or another of us. They don’t know what they’re doing there and neither do I.

After that, we reconvene in the green room, where Artis makes us sign more programs, as it turns out, these are so we all have signed programs ourselves. Then each participant is given a framed plaque commemorating the event. I ask Don if he’d take mine so I don’t have to schlep it on the train.

We say our goodbyes and I walk back out into the rain.

Technology’s not my friend. And yet, I’m knee-deep in it all the damn time. How did that happen to a dumb painter? All I’m built to do is smear colors onto flat surfaces, but I spend days battling websites, apps, recording equipment, and whatnot. The past couple weeks, between moving this newsletter and relaunching my podcast, I’ve lost all sense of what it is I’m doing.

Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war…. And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. —Viktor Shklovsky

The trouble is I don’t know how to compartmentalize or pace myself. I dive into the deep end and flail about until I happen onto whatever piss-poor survival tactic is nearest to hand, then go and fuck up something else that was working just fine until I decided for unfathomable reasons that it needed fixing. Don’t ever hire me to do anything you might want to remember in its previous state. I will wreck it and turn it into whatever ragged thing I can manage with my rudimentary “skills”. I’d have fired myself decades ago, but there’s no one else here to do this work.

What’s prompted this current bit of hand-wringing is my laptop going kaput. I plugged it in overnight and it didn’t charge. By the time I recognized there was a problem, it was down to 2%. I took it into the Apple store and the Genius assigned to me futzed with it for over an hour, then threw up his hands and said the problem was above his paygrade and that my laptop would have to be sent in for repairs. I panicked for a moment as I pictured all the tasks I needed to do, that I only know how to do on that machine, being left undone. A few weeks before, like a fool, I traded in my backup laptop for an iPad. I wanted something I could read yet-to-be-printed books on. Also, I wanted to play around with an Apple Pencil, having never attempted to “draw” digitally.

My Genius commiserated with me. He agreed than the iPad is basically a toy. Then he recommended I not waste money on an overpriced Apple keyboard and just get a cheap one from Best Buy. Which is what I did. I’ve been banging my head against the many many limitations of this toy almost-computer ever since. I hate that I’ve come to be so dependent on these damn machines. That when one goes down, I have to relearn everything that’s taken me years to work out. Reminds me of when I was trying to quit smoking. The resentment and spasms are pretty similar. It really is harder and harder to pivot and change as new things come at me. I’ve felt like an old man my whole life, but now that I actually am one, it’s no fucking picnic. I wonder if it was as trying in other eras. They didn’t live as absurdly long as we do, so there may have been less upheaval to contend with. Then again, I picture the man in his horse-drawn buggy cowering as a Model A blows by and figure he didn’t have it so easy either.

Now I’m sitting at Jackalope, manually deleting seven years of posts off Substack like an insane person. Why can’t I just let it be another abandoned site and let it overgrow with the internet digital kudzu? Because the idea of that site sitting there unused won’t let me sleep. I have to either keep working on it or burn it to the ground. 

Am I oversharing? That’s what this soapbox is for, isn’t it? For the past few years, my recurring daydream is to quit the internet altogether. But this is a complete fantasy in the foreseeable future. Virtually all the money I make now comes through a screen, even when the work I’m being paid for is mostly done in meatspace. I’m grateful to everyone who’s stumbled onto my efforts. There would be far fewer such stumblers were it not for the internet.

Once I get my precious laptop back I’ll calm the fuck down. Then some other bee will fly into the bonnet and I’ll freak out about that. It’s what I do.

I like to think of it as my process. 

[I reviewed a fun play set in soon-to-be-shuttered karaoke bar, an awful documentary about Alexey Navalny, and helped introduce the new Shel Silvestein stamp.]

I go way back with Dead Rider. The lead guy was in a great band called U.S. Maple about twenty years ago and I’ve followed most of the music made by its former members. The gnarled tendrils of this family tree have crept in disparate directions by now.  I’ve heard one or the other of them play everything from gentle country pop to the most discordant screetching noise collages. They’ve never stopped searching for the true sound. It’s why I’ll go see them whatever they’re doing. They don’t rest on laurels or just play the hits.

Two years of lockdown have made even the most hardened stoic reflective. When I hear Todd Rittman tell the Hideout audience that no one in his band is good at communicating their feelings aside from making this music but that he wants to thank us for being there, I know that a whole field of worms have turned. This thing has truly altered all our psyches, no matter what we may think.

As Dead Rider was winding down, I move from my spot up front to the back of the room. I run into Dan K and tell him how happy it makes me to see this band. He agrees. I try to pinpoint the thing that sets them apart. All I can come up with is that they’re remarkably restless. They never play the same show twice. They back themselves into corners, then have to fight their way out. It’s way beyond the technical mastery of their instruments. Aptitude and skill can be the dullest thing in the world to see and hear. These people push past facility into dangerous places where failure or bad taste is very real. They don’t want to bore themselves or us, so they keep jumping off the cliff.

A couple days later, I run into Tim at the bar. He was at the show and is still basking in its afterglow just like me. You know the show was special when longtime musician is that impressed. We always judge the thing we do ourselves so harshly when others do it.

Tim goes back to his table and I doodle a couple of the more annoying regulars. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum or Dumb and Dumber, I can’t decide which. They’re so loud and stupid and full of themselves. The bald one catches me looking over and comes to take a look. He shakes his head after switching to his readers so he can make out my sketch in the darkness. Takes issue with my making his cranium look like an alien. He shakes his head disapprovingly, then returns to his cackling mate.

I show the sketch to the bartenders and she laughs approvingly, but gets worried the two clowns will notice. I tell her what chrome dome said. If the shoe fits, right? I think I more or less caught his likeness, or at least something about him.

Like Dead Rider, I’m always trying to hit a note that rings true, never knowing how or why it will happen.