I’m going to start right off by saying that I have no idea whether these things exist in places other than LA and New York, but I’m writing about them anyway because they rock my frickin’ world.
Postcard racks.
Have you seen these things? I remember the first one I spied. I was on vacation from UGA (combined with a radio conference for WUOG) in New York. This was August of 1996, just after the Olympic Games. I remember that because my hair was short and blonde, which was how I’d worn it for my job as Technology Coordinator at the Olympic Soccer Stadium. Not that this has anything to do with anything — it’s just how I remember when things happen.
I was eating with our music director at a cool dive in the Village with a sidewalk elevator/lift thingy outside the window. Dew Drop Inn was the place. On the wall between the restroom doors, there was this rack of postcards. Twenty different kinds of postcards and about 100 of each kind, in handy little slots.
I wondered if I could nab a few of these postcards and send them home to friends, bragging about stealing postcards during my first trip to New York in 20 years (and that previous trip was before I’d think about writing postcards home, I’m sure). Then I saw the statement, “Free Cards Brought to you by… blah blah blah.” No idea what the “blah blah blah” was, now, because I was enchanted by the words Free Cards.
New York was my new favorite place to shop for stationery.
And then, one summer later, when I visited LA… holy shit… postcard racks. In every restaurant.
That may just be why I moved here. I can’t recall.
See, postcards are cheap to mail. I think we’re at 21 cents postage on a postcard these days, and that’s about what I remember letters going for, back when I was a kid with pen pals all over the country (and Canada, eh, but those hosers required extra postage, so I didn’t write to them as often). And I can just about say everything I’d need to say to catch someone up on my life in the space of a postcard.
Yeah, I know… hard to believe… but trust me, if I have more than a postcard’s worth to say, I just scrawl my URL and make people drive up my hit counter.
I’m realizing that I write a lot about writing. How does that phrase go? “I write, therefore I… write?” Yeah, that seems about accurate.
Okay, where was I?
See, I have this whole OCD-organizational fetish thing going on. So, I can’t just pick up postcards. I have to categorize them when I get home with them. Yes, it’s true. I have an entire box filled with blank postcards, free from these racks, all in some sort of systematic filing strata, the evidence of years of accumulation.
I could write a postcard a day to every person in my address book for the rest of my life and never run out of postcards.
This can’t be healthy.