I just came upon a treasure trove of potential blogs, on scraps of paper and clippings I had stashed away: here a stash, there a stash, everywhere a stash stash. (How can anyone love EVERNOTE or STICKY NOTES the way I love my bits and pieces?) Blogs were still in my future, I just didn't know it. Pick one....
Okay, heres' one suitable for vacation time. (You have noticed, I am sure, that Americans say vacation while Canadians say holidays.) Postcards. Well, I have a little to say about postcards. I buy them when I am on a trip but I do not mail them. I buy them and tape them into my daily journal/diary/travel record, first because I do not take pictures and second, because the photographs are better than any I see being taken around me and third, because I am not in them. The last thing I want to see when I return home is a picture of me grinning beside someone whose name I can't remember -or never learned, more likely - obscuring the view of a wonder of nature or an achievement of mankind.
I knew a man who bought postcards with a dedicated and indefatigable devotion and who also never mailed them. He was a packrat, and his packratting eventually paid off. Later in life as he was eking out his life as a writer (we all eke), he created coffee table books out of his divers collections. His postcards book, dating back several decades, was delightful. I thought of him when I saw The Forty-Year-Old Virgin in which the title character sold his collections of (still wrapped) action toys and made a fortune. Unmailed postcards, too, can be valuable.
Then I think of all the clichés written in postcards and I cringe, writhe and grimace. "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were her." (sic) Why not say, "I hate it here." I remember a postcard my brother wrote the first time he went reluctantly to summer camp.
"Alone/Park Bench/Camp Obliquity (I made up the name). Having a terrible time. When can I come home?"
Well, self-pity can be funny but ordeals have to be lived through before they can acquire a patina of nostalgia and a wash of humour.
And that's all I have to say about postcards. All my note said was "Discuss Postcards."