So forget Bukowski. Forget bureaucracy, hypocrisy, and small-minded, mentally drunk people.

What I really want to know is who are you? Who are you, Mac user from Oakland? Telus subscriber from Salmon Arm, BC? Occasional reader from Captain Cook, Hawaii? West New York, NJ? Odessa, Ukraine? Pohang, Korea? Spanaway, WA? Providence, RI?

Every once in awhile I check my stats. I get to see all the interesting cities, countries, and provinces that visited, but since only a few people comment, most remain invisible. Which makes me feel — I don’t know — like ours is a one-sided relationship. I mean, you know pretty much everything about me, from the trivia of my coffee obsession to the passion of my causes — I even showed you my working man hands & told you who I’m crushing on — don’t you think it would be nice if just once you pushed the comment button and said something like,

Dear Jane, it was an accident. I was trying to find porn pics of dreadlock girls.
Dear Jane, I wanted something I could copy for Comp. 101. I was disappointed.
Dear Jane, I can’t stop stalking all things Anna Nicole.
Dear Jane, I was looking for the Verne Troyer sex tape.

I’m fascinated by my two readers from Chicago, IL who never comment, and my one faithful reader from Alton, New Hampshire. I’m also curious about my visitors from Murfreesboro, Tennessee or Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

Since nothing I’ve written to date has compelled the lurkers to respond, I’ve come up with a contest. Comment here, and tell me something, anything:

Dear Jane, I only come for the wit of your regular commenters.
Dear Jane, I’m just waiting for another article on Susan Powter.
Dear Jane, your run-on sentences hurt my eyes.
Dear Jane, I just came to find out what V-Grrrl or Linda sees in you.

And I will pick a random winner and write an article just for you. About anything that won’t get me stalked by the FBI or kicked off the internet. A story featuring an out of work Starbucks employee and a Mormon missionary? Done. A love letter to Barack Obama? Oh, yeah. An ode to black socks and Bermuda shorts? So do-able.

And since I don’t want to exclude my regular posters, whose visits here make having this blog totally worthwhile, all you have to do to enter is tell me about your favorite pair of shoes. Espadrilles? Adidas? A pair of zebra print platforms you owned in the 70’s? See how easy I’m making this for you?

The winner will be chosen Sunday, July 27th. So start thinking about the best way to torture me with a writing request — and in the meantime introduce yourself, or tell me about your favorite pair of shoes!

ShareThis

His greasy hair is tucked under a baseball cap but it’s his brother’s team, not his. I settle on this detail for a moment, and know that if I were a more cunning person, I could use it to my advantage. If I were more like Jesus, I might even find some compassion for the Bastard. In either of those scenes, I might start off telling him about my millionaire sister. The one born to favored status because my mother dreamed that the ghost of her beloved sister, Olga, entered her womb during pregnancy.

So pretty, my mother would say of Dianne Olga, like an angel. The angel worked for six years of her life, married two men of means and retired early. Wearing blinders, she waxes passionately about bootstraps and hard work, and how her tax dollars shouldn’t go to people who are too lazy to buy health insurance.

The Bastard’s brother was a famous baseball player, a World Series champ, whose fourteen year career left him set for life. The Bastard, who grew up playing the same game in the same Minnesota fields, isn’t even a real supervisor, but a 204B – postal lingo for a mail carrier acting as a temporary supervisor.

His act is rough and unpolished. He can’t hide his smirk or his love of power, no matter how fleeting or temporary. He peels the schedule he so carefully crafted from the clip board and hands it to me.

There are rural carriers in the postal service who are losing their homes to foreclosure and writing bad checks for groceries. Unlike city carriers, who are paid an hourly wage, rural carriers are paid based on yearly mail counts, which are always held during the lightest season of the year. This year, the count was in March. No holidays, no back to school ads, no spring clearance sales. The mail count was so low, that the pay for almost every route ended up being cut by one to three hours a day. It doesn’t matter how many hours the carrier actually works to deliver the mail – he or she will be paid for the hours calculated during the annual count, no matter how heavy the volume for the rest of the year.

A large number of the rural carriers employed by the USPS are relief carriers – people who passed the exam to become a regular carrier, and who are waiting for an open route. In the interim, they work at a lower hourly wage with no health insurance or retirement benefits. The wait for a regular opening can take years.

The schedule the Bastard hands me is meant to add injury and insult in equal measure. He has taken to punishing the relief carriers he does not like, while giving full-time or nearly full-time hours to those he does. He has bent and twisted official rules and a scheduling matrix to meet his goals.

Houses are being lost.
Cars are getting repossessed.
Lives are being fractured.

He smirks. Adjusts his baseball cap. Points to a regulation he interprets as giving him the ultimate power.

Christianity is everywhere in the government building. It is taped to the walls, inviting people to morning prayer meetings. It is on a box of prayer requests. It hangs from USPS keychains, and is tacked to work areas. The Bastard is one of those that leads the charge. Thursday mornings will find him hunched in a corner, hands clasped, praying to the God whose forgiveness is a sure bet.

The very Catholic postmaster nods his head in approval, knowing that he has bent rules and convention to hire the daughters and sons of favored workers, while extending punishment or goodwill arbitrarily – with tendencies that favor the religious.

The union meant to protect workers is an association. The National Rural Letter Carriers Association. They publish a newsletter with inspiring messages from their official chaplain. Their mammoth failure to negotiate a fair contract for their members is glossed over with talk of God, ethics, pride, and the value of hard work.

Relationships are falling apart.
Anxiety and hopelessness are setting in.
Suicide has been quietly talked about.

The saying “life isn’t fair” has never caused me to shrug my shoulders in apathy. Life is not fair, but most of us know it should be, and can be, much fairer than it is.

This fight is not mine. It’s too big and encompassing and too dirtied by bureaucracy, politics, religion. Ignorance is bountiful, and poorly intentioned people are everywhere, but there are limits to what any one person can do in response.

Instead, I wait for the day people take the blinders of religion and arrogance off, and come into their own humanity. To be forgiven or not based on their intentions, to be loved or not based on their actions, to be blessed or not based upon their merits.

In the meantime, the Bastard smiles like he’s hit a home run in the fourth quarter and the bases were loaded. His parents and God are sure to see that he’s really every bit as good as his brother, even if the cheering spectators are limited.

I plan to escape like Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was 49 when he quit the postal service, saying “I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” He starved brilliantly, becoming one of the most prolific writers of his generation. His experiences with the USPS provided him with many anecdotes and characters.

Knowing that I will soon starve my own way into bliss makes the Bastard less dangerous to me. His darting eyes, paunchy gut, and greasy hair become details for some future story that speaks to the anti-Christ of men who believe their salvation is assured by virtue of Jesus keychains and weekly prayer meetings.

ShareThis

ShareThis