Message on postcard:
Hi Evan — It’s been a great summer and I hope you enjoy this postcard. It’s from Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. At least, it’s a picture of Sleeping Bear Dunes in the background. The raw materials for the collage came from what I think was a semi-permanent garage sale in the Black Hills, and I glued it together in California Colorado, and I’m writing it in Berkeley, California.

I hope you’ll forgive the typos; I took a Percocet earlier because my legs were hurting, but I really hate these pain pills. They make me feel foggy and stupid and it’s difficult to concentrate. My brain starts thinking of words that come later in the sentence and that my hands shouldn’t yet be ready to write, but my hands are like, “What’s that, Brain? Okay, that seems like a good word to write; I’ll just skip like half the sentence; that should be okay.” And my brain is like, “What? Sorry, I was thinking of the music from Sonic the Hedgehog,” and my brain completely fails to stop my hand from doing something dumb.

And in a more general sense, I just write weird sentences. Like when I want to say that I write wrong words, I’ll say that “my hand does dumb stuff”, which makes it sound like I’m shoplifting candy bars or scratching my crotch while I stand in line at the post office.

I had intended to write about the creative process here, and how this postcard came together, but instead I wrote about how painkillers make me feel, which you really could have learned from any seventh grader with bad decision-making skills, poor self-control, and access to an unguarded medicine cabinet. And if he had written this postcard it would have been much more upbeat because he would love the way Percocet makes him feel, and he would think that parsable sentences are for punk-ass dweebs.