can we come for a visit?

Whenever I see "V" as a middle initial, my first thought is the first and last names are dueling.

Roe V. Wade

Oh wait, that's not a name..

I have this fantasy of mailing postcards to random addresses across the country. If I could access some sort of database of everyone's name and address in the entire United States, I could literally just scroll through them and stop. There, that person: Charlene Wattsmen at 70 Bowman St. South Windsor, CT 06074. Done. 

[I just made that up. How weird would it be if she were an actual person and that was an actual address?]

The postcards would all be pictures I created. Maybe they would be drawings. Maybe photographs. Maybe they would be my power bills cut up and glued back together. Ooooo.. I could shred up some dried leaves into a fine, fine dust, then mix in some sort of glue or liquid adhesive, press the mixture onto wax paper on a cookie sheet, let dry, cut up. Yes. I am "crafty" like that. I am willing to put that level of dedication into this project. I even have some stamps and an ink pad so I could totally add a flower or ghost figure to the "card" once completed. 

Every Sunday I read the post secrets on the website by the same name. Every Sunday, I think about what my secret would be. What would I write about? Whom would I write about? Who might see it..?


A long time ago -- like over a decade ago -- I sent a postcard with a secret to post secret. I wrote my name, repeated over and over into a pattern, and used it as the background for my card. That way, I told myself, if I saw it in one of the books they publish or on the website, I would know it was mine (you know, in case it was years later and I had forgotten about it). About 12 years later, I saw it on the website. It took me 4 months to realize it was mine. I showed my sister, "Look! This sounds just like me! How weird!" She said, "Is it you?" It took me 4 months of mental debate to come to the conclusion it was mine. At least, I am pretty sure that was my postcard. 

For the fantasy, I would send out a postcard to every state, or maybe a few just in case some got lost or thrown away. Sometimes I think I would put a return address on them with a sort of invitation: 

"You have been randomly selected to participate in this interactive art project! Please returned a postcard representative of your state to the following address [insert PO Box I would obtain here]." 

I envision taking all the postcards and cutting them into the shape of the state they come from, then putting them together like a puzzle. That would make a pretty cool map, don't you think? 

When I was young (like after my teenage years, but before I was legally old enough to drink) my girlffriend and I read about a town in Texas in a National Geographic. I forget the name of the town or why there was a story about it in the magazine, but I do remember the population was extremely low -- like 35 people. 

I said to my girlfriend, "We should send them a postcard!" 

"How? We don't have an address..." Mind you, this was before the internet was as widely available as it is today -- that or we were just poor. 

The solution was obvious, "Dude look. The title of the article is the zip code of the town. The population is so low, we could really just send it to the town itself and let the mailman figure out who to give it to." 

About a month later, after we had moved on to some other hair-brained idea, a boring white postcard came in the mail. It was from a saloon in Texas and read, "Got your message! Come on down!" Later that week, we took a road trip to Washington.