Postcards Archives - Page 11 of 19 - Fully Psyched

Subscription postcards: Big strides, greywater reservoirs, and badgers

January 24, 2013 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage: A giant foot about to step across the Mississippi headwaters. Text: Award for stepping across the Mississippi River, Lake Itasca, Minnesota. — Hello Andrew! Here’s a postcard I picked up last summer at Lake Itasca, home to the Mississippi headwaters. Itasca is a made-up word, derived from the phrase veritas caput, Latin for “true head”. Apparently the actual headwaters of the Mississippi were a matter of some contention. While there I strode across the Mississippi with my dog Skillet. I was warned to be careful; if he peed in the river near the source he could flood New Orleans. A man and his dog, flirting with danger.

Postcard collage: A big sign that says "DAM" in front of a backlit sequoia. — Hello Mollie! I hope you like this postcard — I made it using a dam-awareness brochure I picked up in Minnesota last summer. Out here in the west all the reservoirs seem kind of low. I have been doing my part to help: I save all my used dishwater, and once a week I drive up to the mountains to dump it in the nearest reservoir. I am joining thousands of other planet-loving Americans in my quest for a greener earth. It must be working — when I turn on the faucet, the water comes out soapy and full of potato peels.

Postcard collage: A man in running clothes next to a tent and pine trees, with the text "All Natural". Behind him is a badger. — Hello Kathleen! Here is a postcard that I made last summer while I was in the Midwest. After I made this postcard I saw a badger in Iowa’s Loess Hills — another great case of life imitating art. For such fierce creatures, badgers sure are cute as the dickens.

-Mike

ps: Did you know Wikipedia has an article titled “List of Fictional Badgers”?

Subscription postcards: Big trees, big bears, angry moose

January 23, 2013 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage: Man on ground in front of tree-trunk cross-section with date markers. Text: Class is now in session. — Hello Kevin, and happy New Year! Every January it is nice to look back across the years and take a gander at the soul-crushing march of human progress. And what better way to do that than in tree form? Class is now in session! You’ll need a notebook, work gloves, and a chainsaw. Excelsior!

Sincerely,
Professor Tree

Postcard collage: Black bear climbing up sand dune. Text: Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan. — Hello Elizabeth! This postcard is from Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. They are big hills made of sand, located on the shore of Lake Michigan. The dunes got their name from a Native American story. They say a bear and her cub swam across Lake Michigan. When they were done, they laid down on the shore for a long nap. It was so long that they got covered with sand, forming the big hills! According to the story, the bears are still down there sleeping.

Postcard collage: A moose sneaks up behind a man with a fish. Text: Moose on the loose. — Hello Carmel! This is a postcard that I made last summer while traveling in Minnesota. It depicts a moose sneaking up on a man to steal his lunch. According to the book Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, moose in the United States and Canada kill more people per year (six) than any animal except snakes (twelve). In Anchorage, Alaska, more people are attacked by moose than bears. An Alaska state wildlife biologist warned to “assume every moose is a serial killer standing in the middle of the trail with a loaded gun.” Personally, I think that makes Americans sound more dangerous than moose.

Subscription postcards: A cold glass of holiday delight

January 22, 2013 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage: Woman on surfboard in front of an oak tree backlit by sunset. Text: Don't run from the weather. — Hello Bridget, and welcome to 2013! I hope you like this card, it’s one of my favorites that I’ve done so far. Fun fact: The flower design on the left-hand side of this card is taken from the barf bag that sat next to my bed during last summer’s hospital stay. It’s probably the nicest barf bag I’ve ever seen. Supposedly it is even fire resistant. Which is good if you don’t like fire, but bad if you don’t like brominated flame retardants. If you don’t like fire or brominated flame retardants, it’s a mixed blessing. Life is complicated like that.

Right now I’m at the Stumptown location on Division Street in Portland, and the Paul Simon album Graceland is playing on the stereo. It reminds me of a 1999 Onion headline: “Burned-Out Coffee Shop Employee Just Lets Paul Simon Album Play for Fifth Time”. This is a special subclass of life imitating art: Life imitating art that really only made sense when compact discs were the dominant storage device for personal audio media.

This last summer I downloaded a mix from the Kleptones blog called “Paths to Gracland”, and I listened to it while replacing the transmission in my van. Look it up and give it a listen; I think you’ll like it. Anyway, there you have it, another installment in my series “Stories About Things That Remind Me of Other Things”.

On an unrelated note, I spent New Year’s Day in the Columbia River Gorge, hiking up to a place called Angels Rest. It was clear and cold and windy, and the dogs were with me and there were whitecaps on the water. Which reminds me of something I’ll tell you about later.

01-Don't-run-from-the-weather-(inside-text)

01-Don't-run-from-the-weather-(rear)

Postcard collage: Man on bench feeding pigeons while two gingerbread men fly above him. Caption: Pour a cold glass of holiday delight. — Hello Jennifer! The world didn’t end on December 21st like some of the doomsday-minded people had predicted. It was a letdown for eschatology enthusiasts but a good thing for everyone else. The problem with doomsday scenarios is that eventually the world is going to end — we can say this with pretty much 100% certainty — but so far all the apocalypse predictions have had a 100% failure rate. I’m pretty sure that scientists are right. One day the sun will expand, the oceans will evaporate into space, and eventually the Earth will be engulfed and incinerated. I’d put money on this prediction, but unfortunately I won’t be here for the one to five billion years it will take to collect on my bet. Jeepers, this is a bleak postcard. I should end on a positive note. Predictions for 2013: Humans will continue to love their dogs, and dogs will continue to love humans.

Postcard collage: Man with backpack walking toward cliff. Text: The natural genius. They say or hint yes, he walks away. — Hello Beth! Happy New Year, and here’s hoping that 2013 is a good year. I just wrote a postcard that dwelled too much on the Mayan calendar apocalypse hypothesis before I went on to ruminate about the fate of the solar system. I’ll try to keep it more upbeat here. When writing postcards, it helps to focus on more of a human timescale than a cosmological timescale. So here’s a list of things that help me to stay positive:

– Listen to the 1963 Lesley Gore song “Sunshine, Lollipos, and Rainbows”
– Bake cookies; eat some of the dough but not more than half
– Go to the public library, put inspirational notes between the pages of random books
– Write lists of things that help me stay positive
– Self-referentiality

That’s all I can think of right now. Happy New Year!

Subscription postcards: Floating, whaling, and ruminating

December 15, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage showing an introduction to floating — Hey Bridget — I just drove into Portland from Seattle about a week ago in a 17-foot U-Haul truck with bad steering and a transmission that whined in first gear and squealed in second. Now I’m at my friend Tom’s house at a weekly get-together called Stringband. It’s a group of seven or eight folks who show up in Tom’s living room and play acoustic covers of folk tunes and old standards. There’s a banjo and a guitar and a mandolin and a one-string bass made out of a trashcan and broomstick and et cetera. A little while earlier they played “Drift Away” — you know the song, “Give me a beat, boys, free my soul, I want to get lost in your rock and roll and drift away.” One winter back when I was living in Iowa I walked down to the river while listening to Democracy Now and the music break on that episode was “Drift Away”. It was cold and overcast and snowy and the river was iced over, and also now that I think about it maybe the song was “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” … Anyway, the point is —

Actually I have no idea what the point is. A lot of my stories don’t go any deeper than “things remind me of other things”. Which is pretty much the only way I know how to understand the world; I remember as a kid being fascinated by the idea that every word in the dictionary was defined by other words in the dictionary that were in turn defined by yet other words in the dictionary.

Anyway. When I moved away from Iowa I took a fully loaded 30-foot truck to Seattle. Now I’m moving my stuff in a 17-foot truck. Which means that my life is now 13 feet of stuff more simple.

Postcard showing a bear on a toilet — Hey Steve — Greetings from Stringband! It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m at Tom’s house. Everyone is singing songs and being merry, and I’m sitting at the dinner table wondering how you get a bear to pose on a toilet for a novelty photo. The world is laden with mystery, Steve, and sometimes it is healthy and productive and necessary to ponder these mysteries. But sometimes it is counterproductive and isolating. “Ponder wisely and ruminate not,” says the man imagining Yogi the Bear mounting his porcelain throne.

Postcard collage about mountains and whaling and the Pacific Northwest — Hello Andrew! I grew up in Iowa, far from the ocean, but the natural history museum at the local university was lucky enough to have a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. It was an old skeleton, from back when whaling occupied a place in our culture that was as important to cable-knit sweater wearing Cape Codians as the Macarena was to everybody in the 1990s. No one could imagine life without it. But time went on.

We used to use whale oil in automatic transmission fluid. But the TV show Flipper changed American minds about sea mammals, and in 1971 the United States banned the importation of sperm whale oil. Soon thereafter American automakers began using entirely non-cetacean friction modifiers in their automatic transmission fluid. The 20th Century was a good one. It was the century when we stopped putting whale juice in our cars.

Subscription postcards: The Tacoma aroma, a giant cube, and alpine megafish

December 14, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Postcard collage of Tacoma sunset — Hello Carmel! I drove through Tacoma, Washington on my way to and from Thanksgiving in Seattle. I’ve passed through Tacoma probably about a hundred times, but I’ve only ever stopped there once. Tacoma is famous for what they call the “Tacoma aroma”. To be fair, the smell is a lot less worse than it used to be, but the name has stuck around even if I haven’t.

Postcard collage of gigantic northwestern Rubik's cube — Hello Evgeniya! This postcard has a Rubik’s cube on it, but to me it looks like the Borg from Stark Trek. I saw a page on the Internet that described in great detail the similarities between the Bible’s description of heaven and the Borg. Heaven is, apparently, accordion to scripture I mean, a gigantic cubic city 1,500 miles per side.

There is a lot of interesting stuff on the Internet. I saw another page that purported to show telescopically photographed evidence of intelligent life on Jupiter. It would have been way more exciting if the evidence didn’t appear to have been created in Microsoft Paint. There’s such a fine line between the work of crazy people and that of Kool Keith.

Postcard collage of high-mountain alpine fishing — Hello Jeff! Greetings from the Pacific Northwest! There are a lot of annoying environmentalists out here complaining about our nearly depleted ocean fisheries, but you’ll never hear peep from these negative nellies about our mountain fisheries, which are doing fine. All you need to eat like a king for a year is to walk up to the top of a volcano — like Mount Hood, shown here — grab your fish, and return home as our fathers did and their fathers before them. These succulent fish are light, tasty, and delicious, and thanks to their unique ability to metabolize volcanic gases, a 10,000 kilogram specimen can grow to maturity in just three weeks. It is virtually impossible to deplete these fisheries, but you won’t ever learn about this amazing food resource listening to Ralph Nader or Rage Against the Machine. In fact, pretty much the only place you will hear about these alpine mega-fish is Lyndon LaRouche’s newsletter, to which I urge you to subscribe. LaRouche is doing a lot of good work right now. He is the only major political figure working to advance the idea that global warming is caused by emissions from the Crab Nebula, an idea that I regard as being highly plausible.