Bad Mailman

At the Eagle Creek post office, where I was sent without warning soon after arriving at the Circle City office, my supposed original assigned station, after a week of running routes from the Oaklandon station, which technically falls under an Indianapolis address while seeming to lie in a different state, country, possibly even dimension, in a deep muddy gash of another universe, a woman I‘ve never met pointed me to a casing cubicle and told me not to bring back any mail, and when I got to the desk there were stacks of mail from yesterday in addition to the heavy load for the day, along with 106 packages, for a route I’ve never done in yet another part of the city that surely doesn’t exist independently of me but materializes out of black fog as I approach and move through it like old computer rendered background graphics in some crude boxy pixelated nightmare puzzle game, Silent Hill post office edition, or, alternatively, a subaltern introcolonial part of an imperial city that does exist all too independently of me, revoltingly so, as a heap of brutally juxtaposed corporeal excreta and signifying chains, medieval sci fi villages and coiled and constrictive snaking subdivisions. 11 hours later I came back to the station with three trays of undelivered mail and 70 packages and politely signed a resignation form. It’s not for everyone, the evening supervisor said, and I agreed. I was tempted to drive the LLV through the side of the building.

And to think it could’ve been a career. I could’ve retired after 20 to 25 years of labor disputes, grievance filings, timecard issues, vehicular accidents, moderately compensated surgeries, fistfights with apartment mailbox loitering oafs, armed robberies, limbs lost and facial tissue eaten from pitbull attacks, punctured scrotal area, blizzards, hailstorms, heatwaves, not to mention the cultural enrichment and nootropic boost of daily office talk.

On one occasion In Lawrence Indiana, two free range pitbulls circled me, howling and snapping. Somehow I got to my van before they mauled me. These dogs owned by missing link humanoids cretinously released into fenceless neighborhoods during the day don’t make for comical little confrontations or chase scenes, slightly spritelier lassies tugging at pantlegs. These are beasts bred for maiming and killing, with broad skulls and jaws and sturdy skeletons and dense muscles and a psychotic disregard for their own safety and comfort, who go berserk upon sighting a stranger, quick to bloodlust animals popping up in higher numbers as the population grows and becomes more fractured and distrustful and antagonistic, in settlements with more turnover and workforce churn.

In some neighborhoods I delivered mail to identical graham cracker townhouses on candy cane lanes, where the occasional elderly couple gets their cholesterol lowering steps in, and in others I leapt over steel bear traps and landmines on mudrut lawns of particle boarded houses ribboned with caution tape, cyborg murder dogs snarling on the periphery.

Streets where people raise families mere blocks from public schools, roads and creek embankments covered in garbage and stalked by packs of toxic waste born hyenas; front yards and doorsteps littered with beer cases, liquor bottles, cigarette butts and shotgun hulls. Green grass obliterated by each working member of the family parking their octocab truck on the lawn, verdancy, the color of luxuriant life drowned in oily, beaten and upturned earth, bitter brownie mix at the bottom of a forgotten melting pot.

The world isn’t nearly as homogenized and banal as people who stare at computer screens all saying the same thing seem indefatigably fond of saying, but that isn’t necessarily cause for relief. Indeed the varieties and discrepancies among human types and anthropocenic environments push the everyday rationalized and flattened imagination to the heights of the postmodern sublime (Better to visit the same four coffee shops or corporate workspaces in globally centered cities and read the same jittery skimming hobbyhorse theorists and say it’s all the same now). Real deal old country architecture and ancient handcut stone a few miles from a polymerized and factory funneled imitation feudal village for present day peasants. Somalian and Venezuelan refugee apartment complexes in central Indiana named after landscapes that evoke Spanish and Italian romance, shared lots and gravel paths layered with dog turds in precisely dateable stages of petrification, not far from drawbridge castles where scions receive postcards from lovers vacationing in London. Honey Creek apartments, right next to a gnarly stream with rusted appliances jutting from its banks. If you said it flowed with pure sewage that would still be euphemistic.

In a place called Tudor Park, an expansive compound where one isn’t exactly reminded of the English Middle Ages except on the note of a possible outbreak of the black death, I walked through perplexing muck looking for hidden mailboxes when I heard what sounded like a cat crying, a stark and mournful and downwardly sloping moan. Not long after, when I turned a corner on one of buildings, I found him; on his side, as if sleeping, but with wet and rumpled fur, crushed backbones, his belly torn open and his little organs spilled out. It had to have been one of the numerous pitbulls or german shephards. Sudden darkness for all time right where spirit flared moments ago, while sun and shadows continued to glide and the wind moved the branches of nearby trees and children played and the dog who did it took a dump on the neighbor's front steps.

Even after my shameful performance at Eagle Creek I would’ve kept working at the post office, if they wanted me to keep working there, that is, had I not found another job the week before, but that’s enough for a good long while about the working life.