An Honest Living

Last week a snowstorm unloaded on Indianapolis. Or it was a few days ago, last month, another lifetime. What are the days to me but unopened letters, curd-colored envelopes in boxes at wrong addresses, the perplexing tracks of erratic escapes through the provincial urban wilderness.

Six inches of snow by the first evening, with more on the way. Roads, sidewalks, steps, doorways buried in heavy wet air, the sky meeting the ground in a biting grey mud. People everywhere lurched into action, rolled off their couches and rose from the velvet coffin body shaped divots in their memory foam beds, felt the urgency of the moment, the pull of civic duty, and ordered products on amazon, called into work, took the week off, cancelled plans, queued up their miniseries, gathered stuffed animals and brought hot water to a boil for a cup of sleepy time tea.

The next morning the mail was late getting to our station so we delivered packages as the sky continued to pour sludge and dust on the city. A nice light day of rectum wrenching driving on government issued cold war era vehicles poorly equipped for cold weather, finding places to park on mounting exhaust and oil-stained snowbanks, peeling out and fishtailing, carrying brown boxes, feet sinking as I climbed covered steps to the frozen shut doors and receptacles of fallout bunkers.

When we don’t deliver the mail on any given day, it doesn’t evaporate, it thickens, bulges, groans under its growing bulk, cries for sweet deliverance, release from its bundled hell. Two days after the initial snowfall the streets still hadn’t been plowed and the sidewalks and steps hadn’t been shoveled or salted. But I had double mail and more packages. Sometime after, the weather warmed just enough to melt the topmost layer of snow, after which it froze again, hardening the streets into a slickened shell.

The days have blurred together like the shellacked landscape; I can’t strictly recall the timeline. All I know is the repeated experience of stepping on ice holding a box of glass jar liquid botanicals, the lightning strike of my nervous system scrambling to maintain upright posture and unbroken bones, the searing panicked muscle contractions, my core clenching so violently I’m nearly sucked into my own butthole. The ongoing flirtation with frostbite, the will they won’t they prime time sitcom tension between gangrene and my fingertips. The slimy wet sock feeling, the trays of mail and the snow cracking under foot sounding like a dying belch of an ancient amphibian.

More than a week after the first snows, after additional freezing, many residential streets and sidewalks remain unplowed and unshoveled, with doorsteps encased in sheets of ice. Far above, overhead, icicles with the girthy bodies and skull piercing tips of war lances hang from awnings and rain gutters. The general surroundings exude frigid abandonment, civic decline, managerial bumbling and ruthless reptilian calculation. There’s no telling if the people inside the impregnable snow fortresses are still among the living, if they’re chugging hot chocolate and facetiming relatives under alpaca blankets or if their frozen bones are being gnawed by starving dogs.

It’s as if citizens of Indiana no longer live in a historically established climate with moderate to severe winters, with months of snow and ice requiring shovels and salt and trucks and organized plowing efforts. Are we all dwelling in the mental tropics, calypso music playing as delivery drivers slip and shatter spinal columns and cars drift into streetlight poles. Subequatorial savages, solitary in a state of neo nature, ordering 30-packs of coconut water, shamanic ointments and sooth saying implements. An incoherent population of cackling blubbernecked administrators cutting costs on municipal services, letting a privatized market manage public care(the equivalent of tossing roadkill to jackals), the vegetate from home greenhouse transplant keep under glass in case of emergency affluent electric collar employees and surreel estate agents currently still swiping around for a snow shovel app, the weatherblasted rawhide doordashers, immigrant and delivery drivers and corn syrup fed oafish utility workers, and the frozen solid corpses of hobos in igloo tombs.

--

It’s still assumed that letter carriers don’t work on Sunday, but that’s because many people still have this image of the mailman as some loveable doofus(or, in another slightly outdated image, as a suspicious perpetrator of cuckoldry), a neighborhood or community fixture who cheerfully walks the streets and glides through picket fences, dropping letters into mailboxes, whistling and waving as American flags flap on porches and the scent of charred hot dog wafts from grills. But the current letter carrier much more closely resembles a harried, anonymous refugee gig worker at a shanghai syndicate, with forced overtime anytime, always on call, available for any route, his organs always ready for harvesting, especially early on, before official full-time status and union protection kicks in, at which point from what I can tell they’re allowed to call off half the week or hobble around the office putting on a low rent lounge act and eating candy bars and drinking soda in the break room for hours before going out to the street.

The US postal service is part senile throwback of a moribund quaint nation and part third arm (or leg) vassal of avant-garde shipping conglomerates, like Amazon, in the ascendent technofeudal order; on top of collection notices and advertisements for pizza deals, we deliver packages, which significantly changes the character and quality of the post office from the user and worker side. There’s no longer a hallowed day of rest; the packages never stop, complicating all the routes, combining the long marches of letter and magazine delivery with the risky driving and parking and package running of an Amazon or UPS driver.

Last Sunday I went to Southport, a bottom-tier suburb of Indianapolis, to drop off packages at human settlements understudied by sociologists, anthropologists, ideologues and airplane armchair philosophers. I wondered at this specific blend of poverty, obscurity, idleness, employment, class and culture.

An expansive yet mostly hidden territory of labyrinthian apartment complexes and circular subdivisions with lanes and courts of the same name, speed bumps so steep that even when driving at a rolling stop they still knocked my teeth loose, dizzying cul-de-ball-sacs, Potemkin style ethnic enclaves, all within the same relative space but still clearly separated; one building full of recently arrived Africans and another housing old stock Anglo Saxons with face tattoos, the variously employed and subsidized, haggard but indomitable participants in the eke-onomy, sporadic buyers and sellers in the grey market, T-mobile workers and customers, maybe some mechanics or tow truck drivers, security guards, part-time foot locker associates, probably some single mother cam girls, third shift motel front desk clerks, those wiring money orders thousands of miles, some managing three chicken bucket restaurants and going to night school and others on disability and beating their stepkids; the question of how all these people entertain and occupy themselves, the mysteries of their digital consumption, the cryptic third party messaging apps also used for sex and body part trafficking; the possible interest in bloodsports, in cockfighting and bear baiting, the three and four wheeler stunt driving in strip mall parking lots, the diluted drugs, the hallucinatory stimulants smoked out of rigged up toilet bowl bongs; crushed rhino horn powder aphrodisiacs; also the haunting question mark of what kind of shadowy entity, individual or collective, manages and owns these rental properties and lords over this undulating biomass. To bring up the idea of integration or cohesion and refer to some shared national or temporal spirit or condition encompassing all these jumbled populations just begs for contempt and makes a demonic farce of most intellectual and ideological discourse.

Talking about populations that often factor into discussions, say on immigration or national identity, but never act in them. Pieces in games played by floating head and hand interfaces. I’m well beneath elite status and I never saw these sorts when I worked in the service industry and I never talk to them online, although I’ve heard plenty on their behalf from others very similar to me in background and education. I’ve only now encountered them because I work a job subcultural and anachronistic enough it puts me in contact with the above ground tunnel people; the job I now work is mostly staffed by those one wrung (or tube) above, whom I’d also forgotten about and never interacted with; until recently everyone in third wave coffee spaces, the advanced urban professionals and pseudo-academic service radicals irritated me with their silo sized water bottles. Now I work with people who sincerely quench their thirst with mountain dew.

--

When I tell someone I work at the post office as a letter carrier, they invariably say that’s a good job, each time with a flat tone and an empty look in their eyes. I can almost hear the drawstring. And I always want to say yeah, then why don’t you do it? But I know how it goes, I’m like them, though maybe more extreme. I enthusiastically endorse almost all employment, a decent person earning an honest living to support themselves and their family, even if it wrecks their body and turns them into a donkey. Nothing wrong with any job as long as I’m not working it.