I awoke this morning from a dream involving peacock feathers, in a kind of thrift shop where I see a bright green minidress on a dress form, adorned with giant peacock-style feathers at the bust. I’m supposed to be gathering up all the green and peacock-inspired pieces—tulle, shoes, costume jewelry—to create an ensemble, but somehow I keep leaving everything in this shop, which is mostly in some kind of garden behind a sort of little house-turned-shop, and I keep having to return and return, as we do in dreams, unable to finish anything, odd people intruding, cousins, all conservatives, one wearing a burgundy faux fur coat with white fur trim and a hood that I had in middle school as she reads the paper while standing in a dirt-floor vestibule and I explain that I am for abortion rights.
On waking, as I do upon each waking in the past decade, I wonder how long the planet has left; AI models say 19 years at the outset before humans are extinct. And I wonder how it is 2026 and we are as a species still bombing one another, and how all these so-called geniuses with all their resources are so super-excited to hasten the end of life on our glorious pale blue dot, why that dream of total annihilation, that ruthless use of power, is so alluring, our world’s end so inevitable for them. It’s hard to get up and start each day knowing how many horrible humans are out there among us abusing, killing, raping, starving, imprisoning all the really sweet people. You know.
Yesterday I received the most beautiful thing in the mail: an actual handwritten letter from an old friend.
From the stationery (a homophone I learned to spell correctly, differentiating it from stationary, in 7th grade, and memorized because letters mattered so much to me) to the greeting to the P.S., the back-front sharing of life moments in ink in the present tense remains for me a treasure, even seeing a hand-addressed envelope in the hallway in front of the mail slot still brings a little rush of warmth.
One thing that troubled me was that this letter from Central Virginia was postmarked GREENSBORO, NC, and that postmark is ominous. Louis DeJoy, who inexplicably is still the postmaster general, has been working to ensure that local postal facilities are no longer processing mail, but gathering it up, shipping it on trucks to facilities hundreds of miles away for that postal stamp, causing delays of days and weeks. I realized that were my friend to mail in her November ballot, say, it would take over a week at best to reach the elections office in her very own town. And by then, it could be too late to be counted, since a new USPS policy states that the postmarked date no longer counts as the actual date for submission of any legal document, from tax returns to ballots. In addition, these delays mean that Americans may no longer receive time-sensitive legal notices on time, such as summonses for jury duty or traffic tickets, causing fines and even arrests.
More fodder for the private prison complex system of forced labor, I guess; more private property to seize and take from the rest of us. (The U.S. Postal Service, created by Benjamin Franklin so that Americans had a little government in their lives every day, now reflects exactly our government, doesn’t it, as in almost no governance at all. As my friend George reminds me, “We are all going to be inconvenienced to death.”)
All that from receiving a nice letter. Because nothing is nice anymore. Nothing can ever simply be anymore, that is, without deep discipline of the mind to take in the moment.
Last week an old college friend, D, came to visit with one of her grown daughters, whom I hadn’t seen since she was a toddler. Back in 1988, my friend accompanied me on a cross-country odyssey, back when you used paper maps and had no cell phones (and the sign on leaving Barstow, CA, for AZ said, “NOTHING FOR 150 MILES” and you drove onward); the entire month-long trip cost us $200, including 89¢/gallon gas for a Toyota truck that got 35 miles to the gallon; and $2.00/night camp grounds when we weren’t in the beds in the houses of relatives. Food was cheap—a full chicken dinner might be $4.95, and we could split it. On return, I made an album, photocopying the road atlas cover, the tapes, cutting out ad tag lines, headlines, and images from the local newspaper or magazines to comment on the photos.
And in 2003, when I moved from Virginia to New York City, I accidentally took my box of curated collage-photo albums to my sister’s basement (instead of my parents’ house) to store, where she had a one-time-only flood that miraculously only destroyed that one cross-country trip album. (D, a practicing witch, said when I told her, “You’re welcome.”) Moldy and blurred to oblivion though it was, I didn’t have the heart to get rid of that album, but upon seeing the horror, D convinced me last week to do that—I snapped a few pages for memory first, and indeed, tossed the hunk of mildew and mold into a plastic bag and out to the trash.
I miss the intimacy of letters and albums. We live in a bizarro world of mass surveillance and public disclosure of our innermost worries and thoughts—but it’s not really new: any of us who worked in drugstores and photo-mats knows that workers kept copies of customers’ intimate pictures to share and discuss, so it’s not as if our camera photos were really private, though perhaps only our postal worker and roommates knew about our private mail from return addresses if not contents.
I remember mentioning once to a writer friend that I kept all the letters ever sent to me—I’ve told you this—and I mean all of them. I’m the keeper of the letters—and I saw her face cloud and shift to panic. What private things had she revealed to me? her face said. I’m sure nothing; I, on the other hand, was a font of confession, and ironically no one has saved letter one written by me. It’s too bad, really, as I wrote really good letters; but perhaps the confessions are best left to the landfill.
This weekend I may go into my closet and begin culling the dozens and dozens of shoeboxes filled with correspondence. On the other hand, given that we are going extinct in 19 years, I probably won’t.
And so, to start another morning at the edge of the end of the world, with love,
Miss O’
The Miss O' Show (Teacher's Edition) 