Tasks / The Jolly Postman
Make art out of other people's letters.
1 to 100 players
0 points
Level 0
In the zone of: The University of Aesthematics
Created by Not Here No More
0 completed :: 0 in progress
Interested in collaborating on this: (no one yet!)
this task is pretired
Comments
Title's a reference to a children's book my sister loves.
I am 0ing this on my next two days off. Watch for it!
The Letter I chose to complete this task with is actually rather famous, and I combined two of my three favorite authors in one task, although I did manage to rather maul my copy of 'All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," by Robert Fulghum. Thank Goodness Terry Pratchett's first edition hard back copy of Going Postal managed to stay safe. ***PS, If you haven't read these, do so immediately!!!***
The art on the letter is of a Post Man named Moist Von Lipwig (read: Moist of the false Lip) who is not exactly what you would call a Jolly Postman... more like the Ignorant Postman. Moist (please don't laugh, he has heard all the jokes before) is a man who was given the chose between certain death and Government services and made an unfortunate choice. In my picture he is standing with his fiance - and please note here that he is HER fiance, and not the other way around - and he is looking displeased because cigarettes are an awfully slow death by comparison to the break neck speed of life that he is used to, and Miss Dearheart is upset because he stole her cigarette. Really he ought to just stick to Extreme Sneezing. Please note the capitals.
The Letter that they are standing on is an entry that Mr. Fulghum once sent to a friend, and then he became famous, so he took the letter back and showed it to the world. I am pleased as punch that he chose to share his words, although his friend may have been a bit insulted to know that his once private, well kept secret is now wide spread. The letter reads:
THIS IS ABOUT A HOUSE I ONCE LIVED IN. An elderly lakeside cottage built at the end of the road at the end of the nineteenth century. A summer place for a family who traveled by horse and buggy out from Seattle through deep woods and over steep hills on logging trails. It was wild there, then, and it is wild there still.
The house sat off the ground on bricks, surrounded by thickets of blackberry bushes and morning-glory vines bent on a struggle to the death. And even though it is only minutes, now, from downtown, squirrels, rabbits, feral pussycats, and "things" I never saw but only heard had long established squatters' rights on the property.
And raccoons. We had raccoons. Big ones. Several. For reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house. Every spring. And for reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house at three A.M.
Until you have experienced raccoons mating underneath your bedroom at three in the morning, you have missed one of life's more sensational moments. It is an uncommon event, to say the least. If you've ever heard cats fighting in the night, you have a clue. Magnify the volume and the intensity by ten. It's not what you'd call a sensual and erotic sound. More like a three-alarm fire is what it is.
I remember the first time it happened. Since conditions were not really conducive to sleep, I got up. When I say I got up, I mean I GOT UP. About three feet. Straight up. Covers and all.
When I had recovered my aplomb and adjusted to the new adrenaline level, I got a flashlight and went outside and peered up under the house. This lady raccoon and her suitor were squared off in a corner, fangs bared, covered with mud and blood, and not looking very sexy at all.
Neither my presence nor the beam of light could override what drove them on. With snarls and barks and screams, the passionate encounter raged on. While I watched, the matter was finally consummated and resolved. They had no shame. What had to be done was done. And they wandered off, in a kind of glazy-eyed stupor, to groom themselves for whatever might come next in the life of a raccoon.
I sat there in the rain, my light still shining into the trysting chamber. And I pondered. Why is it that love and life so often have to be carried forth with so much pain and strain and mess? I ask you, why is that?
I was thinking of my own sweet wife asleep in the bed right above me, and our own noises of conflict mixed with affection. I wondered what the raccoons must conclude from the sounds a husband and wife make at night-the ones that sound like "If you-really-loved-me-you-would-not-keep-making such-a-mess-in-the-bathroom," followed by "OH, YEAH? WELL, LET ME TELL YOU A FEW THINGS...."
Why isn't love easy?
I don't know. And the raccoons don't say.
neat.