Yes, Sundays can be really gloomy. Or at least they used to be. Lately I manage to somewhat control myself - especially if the day before has been a good catch... Well, actually I should not complain about the postal service here: Japan is, in many respects, a paradise for all the lovers of the good ole (some say obsolete) art of letter writing. They always deliver the goods no matter what. Even if the sender has not put enough postage, the guys in green leave your mail in your box, of course adding a note in which they politely ask you to please go to the nearest post office and pay the difference (in Italy, il postino mafioso usually threatens to eat your letter in front of you if you don't pay on the spot). Rain, typhoons or earthquakes will never stop mail here. On the right you can see an envelope I got from German mail wunder-artist Eberhard Janke (of Edition Janus fame). For some reason it got completely wet before it could reach my house. On the left side you can see a brief not of apologies from the P.O. If you don't forgive them, they proceed to commit hara-kiri, like John Belushi's samurai in Saturday Night Live. Actually the accident caused the rubberstamp prints enclosed to bleed into each other, thus creating very interesting visual effects. Here's a nice example of chance collaboration between the artist and the postal service.
On the other side of satisfaction - and of the Pacific - we find the truly evil postal clerks of Baltimore, USA. Look what they did to the poor envelope on the left. It all started because I wrote the name of a zine - Leeking Ink - instead of the one of its editrix - Davida Gypsy Breier. That was enough for them to return it to me. So I decided to try again, but I don't like to do things the easy way, so I re-used the returned envelope, this time writing the right name AND the nice note you can see on the left side: "Dear Mr/Ms Postman, THIS is the right address. Thank you in advance for your cooperation." The ever kind people at the Japanese post office were worried that all those stamps and symbols would create some confusion, so they crossed the "return to sender" stamp, and wrote "to USA" with a black marker. But to no avail: after a few weeks, the doomed envelope reappeared inside my mail box. I've decided to add it to my collection of weird mail...
When you are finished reading this, you'll better check Davida's Web site: http://www.leekinginc.com/