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Art by mail: America’s dazzling, continuing revolution

August 30, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage of Multnomah Falls, salmon, and a quasi-political caption

Message on postcard:
Hey Paul — How is Portland, sir? I’m camped out in McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area (I’d never heard of it either) and I just got your mailing address through Kickstarter. I’ve prepared a bunch of custom postcards for your reward tier, and your timeliness has earned you the first of the batch. How are you always so on the ball? I wish I had your skills.

I hope it doesn’t seem disappointing to get a Multnomah Falls postcard — here I am driving thousands of miles across the country and sending you a postcard from someplace half an hour out of town — but you do love Portland, and you are a fan of America’s dazzling, continuing revolution, so it seemed appropriate. I found a Reader’s Digest “America’s Greatest Splendors” book at an old couple’s garage sale in the Black Hills, and I bought it and cut it up and to pre-make postcards for places I’ll be visiting. But I’m jumping the gun and writing this postcard from Colorado.

Oh, shit. Sometimes when I write I forget that I have to explain things. Remember above when I said “your timeliness has earned you the first of the batch”? What I meant was that you were the first person to respond to the survey soliciting mailing addresses. So I was referring specifically to your timely attention to that matter, and not your overall tendency to act in a timely manner, although the two are certainly related.

It’s dark out and the moon is sunk beyond this rock outcropping, and every once in a while the wind will pick up and rustle something and I’m momentarily convinced that the space beings have shown up to terrorize me. Normally that stuff doesn’t cross my mind, at least not since age 16 or so, but a couple weeks ago in the Badlands I met a girl who was convinced that space aliens are secretly visiting Earth and I guess you know going all Roswell on unsuspecting victims in the middle of the night. This trip has given me a newfound appreciation of my ability to attract and interact with people from some of the more exotic regions of the bell curve.

And of course as I write this I remember this time back in Utah in April when two other campers and I saw a dancing light in the night sky, and it was weird, and I realize that of course I attract and interact with these people; I’m practically one of them.

Filed Under: Collage, Greetings from the Back of My Van, Postcards, Writing Tagged With: art, collage, GFTBOMV giant-sized postcards, Oregon, postcards, travel

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