Postcards Archives - Page 17 of 19

Art by mail: Badlands porthole

September 4, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Message from postcard:
Hi Ron — You had made a special request that you wanted to get something genuine, and as I try to think of some serious subject matter to blather on, I’m listening to a Portland band called S.K. and the Punk-Ass Bitches sing, “It’s all about the money, it’s all about the cash, I want to sign a big, fat record deal.” Which, who knows, maybe that was genuine for them.

Right now my genuine concerns are actually along the same lines. Not so much about a big, fat record deal, but rather the money and the cash, specifically in the form of the huge deductible on my budget-rate health insurance policy. The tentative plan is to call up the hospital’s financial services group and set up a five-hundred-year payment plan. (If you haven’t been keeping up with my web updates, I got a little tossed around by a wild pig.) On the flip side, I’m genuinely happy to still have both my legs and both my dogs.

I’m spending some time recuperating in the Bay Area while I wait for a follow-up appointment with the doc who stitched me back together. Yesterday I met up with a friend who lives in Oakland, and we drove up to the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. A park ranger there saw my bandages and asked what happened to my legs. When I told her, her first follow-up question was, “Did it happen on public land?” It’s tempting to think that answering in the affirmative could have dramatically increased the National Park Service’s pig management budget.

This morning I went out for brunch with a former co-worker, and tonight I’m going to a barbecue that a chemist friend from college invited me to. Being in a big city for a few days has begun to feel like normal adult life, which has me thinking a lot about settling down after all this travel and starting to work on the next chapter of my life.

I love and miss Iowa, my home state, but my feelings on the place are too complicated to sum up here, and I don’t think I’ll be making another attempt at putting roots down there. I have a hard time feeling at home in places, and the only times I’ve ever really felt at home were living in Iowa, and also traveling this summer with no home. Life is complicated…

Art by mail: A South Dakota collage

September 3, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Message on postcard:
Hello Rolf! It’s nearing 5 p.m. in Berkeley, California as I write this. When you supplied your contact info for this postcard, you added a little note: “Faced with a choice, do both.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what I did last week when I had an encounter with a wild boar.

Faced with the classic “fight or flight” choice, I first tried fighting, and when that didn’t work out so well I chose to take off. And as a result I have both a great story to tell and also I’m still alive! Here’s to self-preservation and the mother of all porcine fracases.

And so now I’m recovering in the Bay Area (the region surrounding San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay), hanging out at a coffee shop and listening to Foghat. Tomorrow I have a follow-up appointment with the doctor and I’m really hoping that he tells me everything is okay and that I should resume camping and travel and also continue listening to Foghat. Then he’d whip out a guitar and start shredding while a pair of custom crutches revealed themselves to be fog machines and also there would be a laser light show. But reality frequently falls short of my imagined hopes, leaving me disappointed.

Anyway. This postcard has South Dakota stuff on it, so I should probably talk about South Dakota. There’s a dinosaur here, but there are no dinosaur skeletons in the fossil-rich Badlands — it was undersea during the age of the dinosaurs. But there are lots of neat prehistoric animals — big mammals — fossilized there. I talked to a volunteer who found a tortoise shell the size of a car, but I was more interested in the mysterious and catastrophic end to his former career [as a TV broadcast engineer in Minneapolis] that he alluded to during his science talk.

Detail from the reverse side of the postcard: The Badlands explained.

Art by mail: A dazzling wasteland

August 31, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

Message on postcard:
Hi Tara! When asked to choose between a kid-friendly and non-kid-friendly postcard, you specified, “Vulgarity, please.” So I am gosh dang happy to bring you the most foolin’-est vulgar postcard my pottymouth mind can muster.

My Aunt Christine keeps telling me, “Sweetie, you should use less profanity when you write! You’re too good a writer to use such a lazy trick.” And I’m like, “Dang it, yo! I don’t think you appreciate how flippin’ rough life can be, and how my unique blend of personal experiences has contributed to my one-of-a-kind street flavor. I love you, but you need to respect my fudging work, please.” And the truly sad thing is that when she steps with this bull hooey, she doesn’t even realize she’s instigating the kind of soul-wrenching internecine conflict that legitimates my casual use of profanity.

Anyhowski, take a peep at that map to the right and sit back while I regale you with tales of my fantastic voyage across the American West. It was hot as the blazes of heck the day I drove through the southern reaches of the Great Salt Lake Desert on U.S. Highway 50. Western Utah is home to a few rough-and-tumble street gangs, including the Wasatch Blood Donors and the much-feared Salt Lake Safety Razors. Tensions were running high during my visit, and earlier that week the two gangs had exchanged a particularly cutting volley of letters to the editor. If I broke down in the desert I would have to rely on my own wits and survival skills for up to forty-five minutes, which is how long the sheriff told me I could expect to wait before encountering a random act of good samaritanism.

“Shucks, sir,” I said to the sheriff, “I don’t think you realize what a bleedin’ tough son-of-a-good-mother you’re talkin’ to.”

But the sheriff was unimpressed. “Don’t be a silly fool, son. Stay the night in my guest cottage and you can chow down at the senior center spaghetti dinner tonight. My treat.”

Well, I knew better safe than sorry, so I looked him square in the eye and took him up on his hospitality. I learned a valuable lesson that day, I assume.

Map of Great Salt Lake Desert — The above-mentioned map of the Great Salt Lake Desert.

Art by mail: America’s dazzling, continuing revolution

August 30, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

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.

Art by mail: Devils Tower National Monument

August 29, 2012 by campbell Leave a Comment

For the next week or so I’ll be posting a series of oversized postcards I sent to my Kickstarter project backers. For this first post, I’ve taken the liberty of including a scan of the back of the postcard. It should give you an idea of what the handwritten component actually looks like.

Especially astute readers will notice that there are one or two tiny differences between the original and transcribed text. As a general rule with these postcard updates, I preserve the text as originally written except in cases where the addition, removal, or rearranging of a very small number of words can remove ambiguity or clarify my original meaning. But there’s no heavy editing, because I want to preserve the original flow of the text. When I write things out with pen and paper, the slower writing pace seems to affect the way I frame/state ideas.

If there’s a more substantial change, I’ll place it in brackets, as I’ve done with the new sentence at the very end of the transcription.

I hope the above explanation comes off as informative and not blah-blah-blah art-guy wankery. The sad thing about art-guy wankery is that the spank material isn’t even art, it’s the art-guy’s ego.

Message on postcard:
01. Sebastian — Thanks for backing my Kickstarter project! This is Devils Tower, a huge column of rock in Wyoming, just west of the Black Hills.

02. Devils Tower was featured prominently in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Actor Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the tower out of mashed potatoes in the movie.

03. This was parodied in the Simpsons episode where Homer goes to clown college. Homer sculpts a circus tent out of potatoes at dinner.

04. I frequently goof up when spelling “Devils Tower”. There’s no apostrophe in the name. Apparently there is (in the U.S. at least) a geographical naming convention that drops apostrophes. English is weird.

05. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks while I travel. One of them is called In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Devils Tower was sacred to American Indians.

06. This book is mostly about troubles on the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1970s. In 1868 the Lakota Sioux and the U.S. Government signed a treaty guaranteeing the tribe ownership of the Black Hills and nearby land. Of course you can imagine what happened when white people found gold.

07. In the 1970s, some American Indian activists demanded that the tribe be treated as an independent nation in accordance with the treaty.

08. Others on the reservation wanted to take a cash settlement for the Black Hills. There was fighting within the tribe and between activists and the F.B.I.

09. If the Pine Ridge Reservation had their 1970s murder rate but New York or L.A.’s population, they would have had about 15,000 murders per year. There’s no real resolution today. [Although the murder rate has fallen.]

Text for Devils Tower postcard — If you’re wondering why the text above is numbered, it’s because I sometimes use a layout that places the text into little word balloons.

Clown college and Devils Tower — A detail from the reverse side of the postcard — one of the word balloons. I self-assess my handwriting legibility at maybe 7.5 out of 10, and I welcome courteous corrections from anyone who thinks my estimate is off.

Devils Tower doodle — Another detail from the reverse side of the postcard — a little doodle of Devils Tower. I love drawing tiny little things like this.

A conglomeration of things

Art by mail: Badlands porthole

Art by mail: A South Dakota collage

Art by mail: A dazzling wasteland

Art by mail: America’s dazzling, continuing revolution

Art by mail: Devils Tower National Monument

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