Two cards for two friends in two states, both written in early May, both sitting on my desk for about three weeks, both waiting for a Halloween zine I keep tinkering with before even beginning.
I have a quiet afternoon and these cards are staring at me, "Hey. We should be in the mail, my good Mx. Postage Ghost."
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the zine!
No! Mail now! And! Follow up later!
Immediately after taking this photo, I wrapped up the glued-down bits with thick packing tape (to help the mail process easier) and headed down to the post box. They will be speeding across the system with tomorrow's pickup.
There is a push for perfection, and if not perfection, then completion. An air of "it must be perfect, lest it be dissrespectful." An aura of "If this is not my Everything, then it shows I am Nothing."
It's so pervasive.
My (and I emphasize, direction-only, pressure-none) goal is to make more mail. Celebrate silly and small art more often, for myself and shared with others.
I'm making a zine about Halloween. I have a few people I want to send it to. I both need to find time to draw it, as well as, let go of this idea there is a deadline or expectation.
I come back, again and again, to old B-horror movies.
The kind with production schedules measured in weeks, if not days. Budgets built in the style of "how utterly cheap can we make this, what can we re-use or cut together?"
Attack of the Crab Monster (1957)
My romantic ideal of them is obviously through the lens of "I explicitly love their limitations, I love them because and not in spite of their limitations." That's how I think about mail, when I let go of the impulse to seek perfection, timeliness, a schedule, an ideal, when I forgo expectation.
These are cards to friends.
People who are going to say, somewhere on the positive spectrum of emotion, "Hey neat, card from atticus."
I am going to eat dinner.
Day dream about old monster movies.
Make more mail.
Let's Exchange Mail!
I regularly send and love to receive cards and letters from around the world. Let's talk about cartoons and mail and Halloween, and Halloween cartoons and spooky mail and other nonsense!
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