Postcard Club
Something is happening to my mind. It feels like a million-branched octopus that is slowly and very methodically pulling its tentacles from whatever they were attached to in the world. People’s names. Memories. Facts. How to get from A to B. I’ve had two MRIs in the past six years. My brain looks good. It’s just not playing by the same rules it used to play by.
All of this is to say half the time I have no idea what I’m talking about. It feels like I’m sitting at a bar and I’ve had a drink and my mind is sliding off into the fuck it this feels good place. Like: I didn’t need that stuff anyway. I feel so much lighter without it. Now I can focus on your face and on what you are saying and on how my body feels. Now I don’t have to think about what so and so said to me last week because I can’t remember his name or what happened. Now I don’t have to worry about how much I have to do because I can’t remember.
I feel like the tentacles are pulling into my soul and giving me strength to be myself. If I am less distracted by trying to keep hold of the ten zillion facts of the world, I get to be more discerning about where my attention goes. Having attention to spend can feel like you’re a hungry kid at a candy store with ten cents gripped in your fist. Oh! The panic! Ten cents is not enough! What if I chose the wrong thing! What if I’m still hungry after I have my treat! What if I hate what I buy!
I’ve run out of cents and so now I don’t go into the candy store very often. I have food at home, and half the time I forget the candy store is even there. It’s disorienting since for most of my life I have been obsessed with the candy store, with my ten cents, with how to get more money to I could have more candy. And now here I am, not even in the store most of the time. Who am I? What even matters to me anymore?
I got a postcard from my friend Ridghaus yesterday. I know he mailed it from N.Y.C. because he posted a photo of the beat-up mailbox on Instagram with the message he wasn’t fully convinced this batch would make their way to those who had signed up for his postcard club. But the card made it to Newton and then my friend drove it to the Cape for me!
Ridghaus takes the photographs for his cards, and he writes a personalized message to each of his people. I get art in the mail from a friend. The thing is, I can’t tell you how often I get them (monthly?) or why he started the project because these are the kinds of things I forget. I could ask him, but part of not being in the candy store is that I don’t want to grab for what I don’t have because maybe my hands are supposed to be empty. Do I need to know how often I get these postcards or can I live in a world where I’m surprised and happy to see one arrive?
Donald Barthelme wrote an essay called Not-Knowing, and in the final paragraph he wrote, “But if I have anything unorthodox to offer here, it’s that I think art’s project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world.”
Ridghaus changes my world when he takes a photograph, edits it into an image that pleases him, prints the images on thick paper, writes a message that his heart wants my heart to hear, sticks on a stamp, finds a mailbox, and sends it out into the wild process that gets one piece of paper from his hands to mine. We are a system: I give him a little money; he creates and gives me some of his beauty.
It turns out the candy store is so big, there’s no way out of it.
Yum.
If you want into the club: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ridg
