Fellowe Hermettes,

Have you been accused of living in your “own little world?”

Was “Go to your room” the best punishment you could imagine?

Do you occasionally use your hands to block people from your peripheral vision?

Do you crave being alone?

What sounds better? A big group dinner or eating an apple?

Do you ever wish you were invisible?

Do you live under a rock and like it?

Do you enjoy being invited places and then not going?

Do you truly not give a rat’s ass what people think of what you do with your time and your life?

Or would you like to feel that way?

In a society where we are bombarded by things we don’t want to see, feel or hear… in a world where our language, our structures, our lives are corrupted by crap that rubs us wrong or worse,

in a culture that has expectations for us that we don’t actually aspire to,

living a more hermetic life is the only response that feels remotely human.

The Hermette “Lifestyle” is a reconsidering and re-centering and reclaiming and opening up of your life to the things that matter to you, whether you know about them yet or not.

It gives you a chance to think and experience the world with fresh eyes, while wearing old clothes.

It turns you into a “onan-influencer:” prizing the influence of your own true self.

Creating individuality, originality, and genuine feeling - promoting yourself to admiral of your own vessel,

saving up for your own place in the universe..

exploring the world with as faint a footstep as possible…

that’s the loveliness of being your own rudder, living a truth-directed life,

finding things and places and people you truly enjoy spending your precious time with, or near…

and giving them all the space they need to float their own boats too.

If being alone is the scariest thing you can imagine, why drag someone you love into it?

It’s time to find out how beautiful and fulfilling and magical, coincidental and fun it might be to be.

Let’s end the stigma of being alone.

If we’re going to be stigmatizing something, let’s stigmatize forcing other people to do things they don’t want to do.

Let’s stigmatize doing things that go against your grain.

Let’s stigmatize the excess that comes with architecture and accommodation for co-dependents/people who travel in groups.

Let’s live a life of bicycle-riding freedom and happiness.

Let’s not come to the table until we can show up as complete human beings, meeting each other on common ground, speaking from the heart, learning how to live an original life, navigating an interesting and fulfilling path, and connecting in genuine ways with creatures and nature and the moment.

Let’s let other people go and see where we stand.

Rethinkers, let’s get lost!

News for the modern recluse. was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first-ever gathering of Hermettes at Dixon Place was recorded by an anonymous source. This is that secret recording.

A convocation of Hermettes was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Dixon Place, a rare convocation of Hermettes gathered to hear about Hermette Magazine and to launch a ‘movement’ of elevated feminine aloneness.

A pirated copy of the presentation was recorded.

This is that presentation.

CLICK HERE.

Welcome, recluses!

Hermette launches a whole genre: anti-social media.

Hermette Magazine can help us connect to the fantasy of an ideal life where we leave the material world behind.

Being a lady hermit is hard to pull off. It’s hard to shed the emotional labor, which is why we need a magazine to amp the glamour of nada.

Hermette provides a way to disconnect from the clamor of the social networks, from the pull of feeling needed. It’s a way to connect to your own isolation.

It “lion-ness-izes” star loners, shy people, astronomers, philosophers, nature lovers, grouches, asexuals, foragers, individualists, outcasts, woodshedders, and barren babes.

It has recipes like foraged mussels and watercress salad for one.

It launches a sense of style that ranges from nudity to deep experimentation to not caring that your pants are on backwards.

It reads separation anxiety as separation envy and lets us loose.

It helps women cultivate clarity, perspective, detachment and deep thought.

It explores the revelations, the big ideas, and the deep thinking that can happen only when you dip a naked toe into the ocean of possibility.

It celebrates the twelve volume reading situations. The listening to of one thing for weeks on end. The unrelated. The absurd. The self-directed. The internal debates.

It’s isolation porn. Photos of hermitages and huts and hideouts. The foraged dinners by candlelight. The windblown hairstyles avec weeds.

There are rants. There are essays. There are illustrations. There is fiction.

It comes out only when it feels like it.

It has a website but it’s private; you must subscribe to it or find the magazine somewhere because it will be “distributed,” a.k.a. left in funny places in the hopes that you find it so it doesn’t have to find you.

The point is to create a new feminine ideal: aloneness with your thoughts.

Will actual lady hermits subscribe? Do real musicians read Musician magazine?

It’s kind of a hilarious notion- the idea that any lady hermit would care about having community or support for what she does.

Because the beauty of being a Hermette is never worrying about fitting in or being accepted.

That’s what makes it so “aspirational.”

Hermette Magazine also does away with the editorial we. Rather than saying “our” Hermette coins a more fierce and feline-like determiner: “mrour.”

Mrour motto at Hermette Magazine is: There’s a hermit inside all of us waiting to stay in.

Sign up now so you never miss a rare and precious issue!

FAQs

Q: Which way is Houston Street?

Q: Do you have a minute for Planned Parenthood?

Q: Do you have a Duane Read loyalty number?

Q: Can I get you another pinot grigio?

Q: You all set here?

Q: Can I get that out of your way?

Q: Is that your wallet?

Q: Did you mean to leave that unbuttoned?

Welcome to Hermette: The lifestyle magazine for aspiring they/hermits. was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Risa Mickenberg, Editor Hermette Magazine

I was enjoying my lunch in economy class when it occured to me that it was awfully nice of the airline to include that little packet of pepper that they give you. Even in economy class — to go to all of that trouble…

Then I started to wonder: Was it nice? Or was it eerie?

Why would the airline go out of their way to include pepper?

Why don’t they include any other spices? Salt, yes, but pepper is more exotic, more expensive, less neccessary.

How did pepper manage to wrangle a place on every tray of every airline?

Furthermore, how did pepper get on every table in every restaurant? Even McDonald’s?

Why were people offering to grind it on everything you order?

What was its link to salt?

This kind of wild marketing success doesn’t happen by accident.

What the hell was going on here?

Why was pepper being given away all over the place all the time for free? Was some guerilla marketing campaign being waged, cloaked in secrecy for years?

Who, or what, was behind all of this pepper?

I decided to get to the bottom of it.

I’d heard of the National Dairy Council, the California Cheese Board, the Beef Council. There had to be a National Pepper Council.

There was no listing for a Pepper Council or a Pepper Board. Nothing with pepper.

I tried the American Association of Advertisers and they told me they had no such client.

My internet search yielded a number of Dr. Pepper sites, a ‘Malaysian TradeCouncil,’ and a wide variety of trade associations, the most interesting of which were the Ginseng Board in Wisconsin and the American Association of Beekeepers.

I figured that the Ginseng Board would be the cool people, and indeed they were.

The gal who answered the phone said she thought there was a Pepper Council but she couldn’t remember where. She asked around in the office. They couldn’t find the Pepper Board, but suggested that I call Morton’s in New Jersey. I told her I thought that Morton’s only sold salt.

“Where have you been?” she said.

Her point taken, I contacted Morton’s. They didn’t get back to me.

I called the beekeepers.

The beekeepers suggested that I call the American Spice Trade Association, which I did. The receptionist there seemed intriguied by my questions and put me in touch with their public relations agency.

As per their request, I faxed them my questions.

composed a list of questions. It turned out that I had many.

To wit:

How did pepper get itself linked with salt?

How did salt get top billing (i.e. S&P)? Is there any sort of movement to change the order?

Of all condiments, only salt and pepper are able to transcend culinary class boundaries. Why can’t other spices seem to break the stranglehold position pepper seems to have on tabletops?

Who’s responsible for the ingenius ‘freshly ground pepper’ craze? How did that come about? Did a sales force sell the idea through restaurants?

What kind of leap in sales did pepper see from that movement?

Do children use pepper? How do you inspire early trial?

How did you get those tiny packets of pepper to be included in airline meals and McDonald’s meals?

What kind of mark-up/profit margin do you make on those tiny packets?

Who coined the phrase ‘dash’? How do you think this zesty-sounding terminology affects the way people cook with pepper?

What does having a little packet of pepper add to simple fare like a Whopper?

How much money does McDonald’s spend in the U.S. in a year on pepper? How about United Airlines?

Is the idea behind including pepper more to further the notion of pepper being an essential part of any meal: a loss leader, rather than there for pure profit?

Collectible salt and pepper shakers: was that the most ingenius trick that the salt and pepper industries ever dreamed up or what?

How about the term “peppery?” How did you get honored with your own adjective?

Did cinnamon unsuccessfully try to ape you with the awkward, not-really-a-word,commercial-sounding “cinnamonny”?

Have you experimented with tag lines or slogans for pepper? What have some of them been?

There is no brand name pepper that springs to mind. (ie Morton’s salt, Lawry’s seasoned salt) Was that a conscious marketing decision- to keep pepper ‘raw’ or ‘au natural?’

Did A&P and S&H copy S&P? Could the S&P 500 be a branding opportunity for the pepper/salt consortium?

Is there a pepper/salt, (or a salt/pepper) consortium? Who’s the boss?

Are people addicted to pepper? What’s the difference with getting people to develop a taste for something and developing an addiction?

Are you trying to make people addicted to pepper?

Anita called me right back. She was pleasant but elusive. She told me there were lots of questions she couldn’t answer.

She did have some interesting information.

She told me that pepper is the largest selling spice by volume. And the fourth largest selling seasoning (after dehydrated onion, mustard seeds and sesame seeds). She reminded me, though, that when you use pepper, you don’t use much so, while the volume of pepper used may be lower, it’s an extremely popular spice.

She had an interesting take on the airplane question. She saw tiny pepper and salt packets as a step down from shakers, rather than a step up from nothing. She claimed that salt and pepper had followed sugar’s lead, shaker-wise.

“I think everyone loves salt and pepper,” she said.

Anita pointed out that the “category” is hard to grow by making people want to douse their food with pepper (although pepper-crusted steak or fish is a great example of this technique.) Instead, she said, the pepper industry must continually invent new ways to use pepper. Using it as a rub, in a marinade, using it in untraditional dishes, like ice cream.

“It’s great with sorbet!” she enthused.

Within restaurants, she admitted, she tries to make cooks find more reasons to use pepper, and to incorporate pepper into manufactured foods. Clever.

She also hawks suggestions to health magazines that if people were cutting back on salt they should add pepper.

I asked if there was any hostility or rivalry between the salt and pepper industries and she said, “We do our thing and they do theirs.”

She gave credit to pepper for adding flavor. A Whopper, she said, was “pretty bland”without pepper.

Which raised another question: Does a restaurant’s inclusion of pepper imply that the food lacks taste?

When I investigated further, it seems like a losing proposition for restaurants to put pepper on the table at all: it curbs the appetite, it costs them money…

Is pepper on the table a lingering nicety that has out-stayed its financial practicality?

Or is it the greatest goddamn underground marketing campaign this world’s ever seen?

Who is behind all of this pepper?

Anita promised to send me more material. Material which never arrived.

She was convincing but she didn’t claim to be, nor did I decide, that she was behind the pepper phenomenon.

Assuming that Spice Island was a long distance call, I got on the horn with McCormick’s.

They put me straight through to Mack Barrett, their current Director of Communications.

As soon as I started to question him about pepper, Mack became suspicious.

“This is sensitive stuff as far as we’re concerned.”

“I don’t know how much information is proprietary.”

“We can’t go too far, I’m afraid, in discussing pepper…. [REDACTED] “We’re inrestricted areas here- it can take us into cost and strategy and that is information our competitors might want to have.”

Suddenly, a new question occured to me. I asked Mack, “I know that pepper is a spice but what is salt?”

“I should know the answer to that question,” he said. “I’ll get back to you on that.” He never did.

My questions were still unanswered. Why would restaurants give away valuable pepper as if it were water? What were they getting in return? When was was it going to be payback time? What was salt?

Why were people dodging me? Morton’s still hadn’t called me back, my email to the Malaysian Trade Council was still unanswered, Anita hadn’t sent me the information she’d promised and I was still not able to find any Pepper Council.

The world’s greatest marketer is out there, too shy to take her or his place in the spotlight; like the anonymous genius who started selling stickers with college names for the back windshields of cars, and water bottlers’ brilliant designation of a new kind of cheapskate- the sort of person who orders ‘tap water.’

Like so many P.R. stories, we may never understand the machinations of hidden persuadors on our daily behavior, seasoned by forces whose motives we don’t know, or understand.

Stay vigilant!

#

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2020/11/aba-president-s-statement-re-state-of-the-2020-presidential-elec/

Lawyers need the American Bar Association to mount a defense of the legal process now.

As Trump weaponizes the legal profession against the electoral process, lawyers need a defense of their own.

The American Bar Association has not yet issued a statement about the lawsuits that Donald Trump’s campaign is filing to challenge the election results.

They should.

As the largest professional organization of lawyers, it is important for the American Bar Association to clarify what the role of the legal profession ought to be in this moment.

As the president uses the legal system, and the U.S. Attorney General to challenge the results of a democratic election, should the American Bar Association, which describes its mission as “the national representative of the legal profession to the public and to the legal profession” stay silent?

Judges are dismissing the cases.

Law firms are dropping the cases, lawyers are quitting.

A broad coalition of governmental, professional and private organizations, all related to the elections commission have issued this joint statement declaring the election fair and the lawsuits baseless.

The National Association of Secretaries of State issued a statement supporting the integrity & results of the election as reported.

In a statement published this September, the President of the American Bar Association said,

“My focus will be on four key issues: COVID-19 and leading lawyers through the pandemic; racial equity and intensifying our work on anti-racism; leading the ABA through change; and finally, helping to ensure election integrity.”

The American Bar Association helped secure the legality and fairness during this election, so they’re in a position to defend the role the legal system has played in ensuring the fairness of the electoral process: The ABA partnered with the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors for the Poll Worker, Esq.

Both of those organizations have made statements defending the integrity of the election’s results.

Professional organizations uphold the standards for their professions.

The American Medical Association has issued statements about the position of the medical profession during Covid-19 where the integrity of the medical profession has been called into question.

A statement by the American Bar Association will help clarify the role of the legal profession in protecting and upholding the results of our elections.

The ABA can clarify who the U.S. Attorney General represents — whether he is the employee of the people of the United States or the current office holder of the presidency.

In attacking the integrity of the elections, the integrity of all who are associated with the elections is undermined.

It feels urgent that the American Bar Association take a position.

In the Washington Post, Randall Eliason opines that, while unpopular causes and clients deserve legal representation, there is no moral standard that requires lawyers to initiate lawsuits, particularly frivolous ones.

Particularly when what they are challenging, without evidence, is the legality of the electoral process: a process that the American Bar Association has helped to protect.

The legal standard for every court case includes a sworn statement by an attorney of record that reasonable legal and factual grounds exist to pursue the litigation.

A public statement from the ABA will give all members of the American Bar Association, if asked to work on a case that threatens both the American legal and electoral system, a defense of their own.

Sources & resources:

• The Trump Campaign Can't Find a Judge Who Will Ignore Facts - but It's Trying
• Presidential Transition Live Updates: Election Officials Say 'There's No Evidence' of Breached Voting Systems
• Another law firm bails out on Trump campaign
• According to Justice Scalia, Trump's lawyers should face sanctions for "litigation abuse" | Opinion
• Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council Executive Committees
• Rule 11. Signing Pleadings, Motions, and Other Papers; Representations to the Court; Sanctions
• Opinion | Yes, going after Trump's law firms is fair game
• AMA statement on ongoing attacks on physicians treating COVID patients
• The assault on physicians and science must end
• Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees
• Meet Our New President: Patricia Lee Refo
• American Bar Association
• ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice Voting Rights Service Initiative

Listen to an MP3 of this story here: https://pankmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Risa-Mickenberg-Shoot-Me-If-I-Ever-Look-Like-That-with-FX.mp3

She was young when she said it but she was in a clear state of mind then. She knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want. Those things were solid in her early. She knew what she wanted to become and how to get there. Knew how to mess with men’s minds, change her oil, fastpitch a softball, roll a tight joint, charm her way out of tickets, fuck without getting called a slut, ride English, keep her stomach flat.

Three things she knew then:

She wanted to be a large animal vet.

She wanted to have her tubes tied.

She wanted to never get fat.

In supermarkets, at the mall, wherever we’d see women who were bulging and beaten down, hauling around a bunch of kids, gone to seed, she’d say:

* * *

It stuck with me. We were sure about things then. Hers were the highway taillights I followed home. I made a promise that became my guardrail.

She never gave a crap about getting married. She never wanted kids. Guys were always beside the point with us. They were ways to get things, sex, through. She talked about them like they were stuffed animals. The ones she liked had “nice eyes.” She went for stoner guys with long eyelashes who took their anger out on their transmissions.

They were just scenery.

College in different states. We’d see each other Thanksgivings and it was like fresh horses. We were still on the same team.

I went to her wedding. The guy was beneath her, like they always were. She met my eye and told me she knew it without me having to say so.

“He doesn’t want kids,” she said in the bathroom, hauling up her wedding dress and peeing with the stall door open. We clinked beer cans. He was just another chump.

Spun away to different towns after that, different states and coasts and addresses and numbers, never seeing each other in person after the wedding. Just a Christmas letter with a picture: Her and him in front of a fireplace with assorted rescue pets.

Her letters were careful. Monitored, almost. Her practice. The work they were doing on their house. Like all married friends, no mockery of the husband. No particular indication of dissatisfaction, or of happiness. Just a version of the truth.

Then a birth announcement. No warning. Inexplicable. She was the only one I’d ever known who’d said I’ll never. She took me to Planned Parenthood to ask them to tie her tubes. (They wouldn’t.)

Wasn’t I the keeper of what she really wanted? Hadn’t she asked me to be that? Why was she sending me this announcement? How was I supposed to respond?

These were things we promised each other when we were young and beliefs ran through us like power lines through hills. This fork she was taking: It made zero sense.

I was who I was because of who she refused to be. She’d smacked the rose-colored glasses off my face and I never could put them back. She’d cleared things up for me, got me through ordinary life by treating it like a blur to pass.

I’d kept up my end of who we were.

* * *

The baby, with a hopeful name, like they all have now, was ordinary. Metastasizing annually into a child impossible to imagine loving more than life itself, while the Girl I Idolized grew softer in the hips, wider in the arms, tired in the eyes, looking more and more Like That.

Her eyes looking straight to the camera as if to say, Help me.

* * *

The return address sticker led me to a town in Oregon.

The travel, the expense, the time, the motel life didn’t deter me. I cared about her once and it was good to be filled with care again. It lit a wick she’d threaded through me.

I came to enjoy my days in my room, reading our old notes and letters, making dead sure this was what she wanted. My camouflaged nights of target practice in the forest felt like a teenage throwback to when the sky and the stars were still a thing and my eyes were used to seeing by the moon.

They were friendly in the shop and asked only about the size of what I wanted to hunt, and told me how to take down something that was Boone & Crocket sized which, by now, she was. I asked for something silent that was good for close range. They sold me a dart gun. They said I’d have to aim for the heart.

Watching through her windows was weird. I felt like my old self again, being with her, but watching some future we were both supposed to dodge.

She did the cooking, the way she did for her dad when we were in high school. Still made the same sauce with sausages. Still saved it Tupperware.

She served the husband and the daughter their dinners. The ceiling light yellowed her thickened arms.

She was the one who put the girl to bed. Read her stories. Kissed the ordinary creature goodnight.

Then hours of teevee in the room with the fireplace, on the sofa under pets and afghans. Usually they were too tired to have sex.

I waited for times she was alone. The guy and the kid were her mistake. They were not going to be mine.

Waited till it was warm enough to keep the windows open to the night. I’d pierced the window screen. She was doing laundry. She carried it down to the basement where the windows were too small to get a good angle.

I followed along the side of the house to the kitchen window and watched her: emerging, microwaving some cold coffee, putting a piece of paper towel over it like she used to do. Sitting on a kitchen chair. Watching it rotate through the microwave door.

The dart gun at my lips was loaded.

It was like a photograph. Her, on a kitchen chair, lit by the light on the hood of the stove. Staring into the humming microwave with its own little light.

It was impossible, what had happened to her. It made me want to cry.

She didn’t look unhappy. Just tired. And older. Almost unrecognizable. All of her definition gone. Looking like someone she would never have believed she’d be.

I stepped on a branch and she turned to the window. I didn’t think she could see me. It was dark outside, the lights in her kitchen reflected her back.

She looked a little like her mother did, in the little while I knew her mother. She looked like the ladies in our mall and in our supermarket. The ones who took our spaces.

Something in me went soft as muffins.

Feeling the loss of her and all the girls I knew.

She looked like every other nobody. Like nothing special. Like a million other unfuckable Americans.

I was outside looking in to that diorama of total surrender. It was how I felt all my life.

I lowered my sights.

She didn’t need me to shoot her.

My friend was dead already.

##

________

Risa Mickenberg has been published in The American Bystander, The Baffler, Vice, Purple Magazine, Grl Squash, The Witness, Del Sol Review and republished in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and the Utne Reader. She wrote the feature film EGG (2018) and is the author of Taxi Driver Wisdom (Chronicle Books). She is singer & lyricist for the band Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse and editor of the rarely seen Hermette Magazine.

Originally published at https://pankmagazine.com.

Shoot Me If I Ever Look Like That was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Risa Mickenberg

The Postal Service is the largest employer in some states. It delivers 48% of the world’s mail, including social security checks, stimulus checks, voting ballots, medication, and hospital supplies.

Since the 1970s, the post office has not received government funding. In 2019 over 600,000 postal employees delivered 142.6 billion pieces of mail to 160 million places. If it were a private sector company, the Postal Service would rank 44th in the 2019 Fortune 500.

How could its existence be threatened? How could our government threaten to withhold emergency assistance to a vital part of our lives during a time of crisis? And how can we fix this?

The Post Office created America before America existed.

In her book, How The Post Office Created America, Winnifred Ghallager writes, “The post office was designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen — a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers.”

The Post Office was formed in July 1775 by the Continental Congress, even before the Constitution was signed. The first American Postmaster General was that inventive badass, Benjamin Franklin.

“In 1792, George Washington and James Madison created legislation to allow newspaper companies to send their products through the mail at very low rates and to protect correspondence from any prying eyes. That act is credited with cementing Americans’ rights to free information and privacy, ” writes Nicole Goodkind in Fortune magazine.

Ladies have rocked the P.O. from the get-go.

Mary Katherine Goddard was the first women postmaster in the United Colonies. A printer, she also was the first person to print the full Declaration of Independence with all of the signatories’ names, a radical document that she risked accusations of treason by the British to publish.

Postal Workers Are First Responders

During times of disaster, postal workers are on the scene early, delivering crucial supplies.

Mara Wilson in The Atlantic writes that delivering mail makes the post office a logistics company, putting them in a special position to help when disaster strikes. In a 2011 USPS case study, the agency emphasized its massive infrastructure as a “unique federal asset” to be called upon in a disaster or terrorist attack. The USPS’s philanthropic arm, the USPS Foundation, helps disaster-struck areas rebuild using its trucks, warehouses, and planes to deliver food, medicine, and water.

The Post Office created a path to the middle class for Black America.

Many Black Union Army veterans joined the postal service after serving in Civil War when, in 1864, a bill banning discrimination in postal employment was passed.

The National Alliance of Postal Employees fought employment discrimination throughout the federal government, working with the NAACP in the early twentieth century. In 1940, they convinced President Roosevelt to drop the application photo requirement that was often used to screen out Black applicants.

By 1940, 14 percent of all Black workers who earned above the national median income worked for the post office.

They went postal on WWII. How the Six Triple Eight served with honor.

The first all female, African-American battalion of 824 troops served overseas as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Their mission was to sort and route a huge backlog of mail and packages to American troops.

During World War Two, civil rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to convince President Roosevelt to admit African-American women to the armed services. Thousands volunteered to serve.

Recruits underwent a full 18 weeks of basic, physical and specialist military training. The 6888, like all female U.S. troops, were not allowed to carry firearms, so they learned jiujitsu to protect themselves from enemies of all kinds.

They braved German U-Boat waters and air raids to travel to wartime England and France. Working multiple shifts, 7 days a week, in wintertime in unheated warehouses with blacked out windows, completing a job estimated by the military to take 6 months in 3 months. This, while running their entire battalion, with their own officers, their own mess hall, hair salon, transportation, and rec facilities.

They served under a segregated military, a segregated Red Cross. They were not honored at the national level until 2016 when they were inducted into the U.S. Army Hall Of Fame.

Famous Postal Workers

Along with Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, other famous postal workers include Charles Mingus, Dick Gregory, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Charles Lindbergh, Sherman Hemsley, and Steve Carell who called it, “The hardest job I ever had.”

Postal carriers protect our elderly and disabled citizens

Sometimes contact with a mail carrier is the only human contact home-bound people get. Thanks to the national USPS Carrier Alert Program, USPS letter carriers can alert emergency personnel if they notice a buildup of mail or suspicious circumstances that indicate an accident or illness. This community service works in cooperation with local service organizations like the United Way, the Red Cross, or a local Council on Aging.

Participants receive a sticker or magnet for the interior of their mailbox.

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg said in 2008, “Nobody knows our neighborhoods better than the letter carriers who visit the homes of seniors and people with disabilities every day.”

The post office can test, and drive, new technology.

In Alaska, until 1963, the mail was delivered by dogsled. Carrying mail is still part of the Iditarod Race that runs along the original mail route.

The Greenville South Carolina Post Office began using Harley Davidsons to deliver mail around 1906. There have been all kinds of inventive and excellent-looking vehicles made part of the post office fleet — a huge national asset that can continue to evolve and to serve the entire country.

The U.S. Post Office Inspection Service is a vital law enforcement agency.

In 2014 alone, the agency reported 6,000 arrests and 5,300 convictions ranging from identity theft to bomb and anthrax mailings, to child exploitation and drug money laundering.

In 2018 postal law enforcement efforts last year resulted in 5,969 arrests and 4,648 convictions related to the investigation of postal crimes.

This includes interdiction of opioids. 2017 & 2018 marked a 375% increase in international parcel seizures and an 880% increase in domestic seizures.

The internet is not a public utility. Until it is, the post office is our link to each other.

Rural delivery, starting in 1896, eased social isolation by bringing mail directly to farms. Before that, getting mail required a lengthy trip into town. In 1909, one customer claimed rural delivery had “cut down the cases of suicide and insanity among farmers’ wives fully 50 percent.”

For people serving in the military, for people who are incarcerated, it is vital.

The post office has enabled the success of all American businesses.

From the creation of postal roads, to the invention of home shopping with the Sears catalog, to Amazon and UPS, to home businesses, we owe our success and comforts to the post office and the infrastructure it gives us. It has been an affordable public service that benefits everyone.

Mail is art.

From Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School Of Art to teenagers mailing each other potatoes, to stamps, mail is an art form.

The post office has the potential to be the banking system we all need now.

Banking for the little guy, the small town, and the whole country.

Katherine McFate, President and CEO of the Center for Effective Government in Washington, writes,

“The USPS could raise tens of billions of dollars each year by reinstating post office savings accounts and banking services, which it efficiently provided for 55 years in the first half of the 20th century.

After the Great Depression, people rightly mistrusted private banks that had failed. Then, like now, most banks were not using peoples’ savings to give loans or make investments in local businesses.

People felt safer, pre FDIC, putting their money in a public institution that was backed by the government: postal banks.

Customers got 2-percent interest on their savings accounts, the post office loaned that money to community banks, which then made loans to local businesses. This virtuous circle benefitted the entire community.

Slate Magazine writes, “By 1934, postal banks had $1.2 billion in assets — about 10 percent of the entire commercial banking system.”

During World War 2, FDR used postal banks to sell Treasury Bonds — and “Defense Savings Stamps.” By the end of World War II, the government had raised $8 billion in war funding from the post office alone.

Postal banking can be a game changer for banks and people.

From The Atlantic (2015): “Postal banking” — which just means that post offices run savings accounts, cash checks, and perform other basic financial services — is common in most of Asia and Europe, and only about 7 percent of the world’s national postal systems don’t offer some bank-like services.

Postal banking is a really good way to reach people who haven’t had access to standard savings accounts. One estimate figures that more than 1 billion people have used post offices for making deposits.

The reason why this would be so useful in the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services, which in some places charge usurious rates that send people into spirals of recurring debt.”

In How the Other Half Banks, author and professor at University of Georgia School Of Law, Mehrsa Baradaran, writes “These institutions would remain affordable because of economies of scale and because of the existing postal infrastructure in the U.S. Plus, in the absence of shareholders, they would not be driven to seek profits and could sell services at cost.”

Post offices can also serve rural and urban locations that don’t have banks. Most post offices are in bank “deserts.” 59% of post offices are in ZIP codes with zero or one bank branch, making the post office well positioned to serve people who have little or no access to banking services.

Postal Carriers’ heroics go beyond the call of duty.

Ivan Crisostomo of Sacramento, CA, spotted a young girl hiding behind a tree on his route and, after some discussion, learned that she had just fled her kidnappers, who were searching for her. He remained with her until emergency responders arrived, and is the 2019 Special Carrier Alert winner. The award was created to acknowledge the many heroic deeds that postal workers do beyond their call of duty.

The post office is a failsafe for the internet from hackers and foreign governments.

With buildings in every city, fleets of vehicles, and information that doesn’t belong in private hands, the post office is a hands-on web of connection through the entire country. You don’t have privacy over the internet. But no one is allowed to interfere with your mail.

We depend on the post office for voting and during this crisis.

“Restricting who can vote by mail this year at best makes voting unnecessarily difficult, and at worst puts their citizens at unnecessary risk of catching the coronavirus,” writes Matthew Harwood from the Brennan Center for Justice, which says that nearly 80% of Americans want a mail in ballot option this November. Elderly and differently abled people, in particular, need to be able to vote by mail.

We can’t let our democratic infrastructure be sold to private interests at fire sale prices in a time of crisis, leaving a vital informational network, a fleet of vehicles, and some 32,000 buildings in every city to the coziest corporate bidder.

The post office is magic and that’s why we love it.

It’s in our culture. It’s in our blood. From The Postman Always Rings Twice to Wait A Minute Mister Postman to Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers. We love the people at the post office. We sense their superpowers. If you’ve ever mailed a demo or a manuscript and asked your favorite post office employee to bless it, you know what I’m talking about because, friends, it works.

What can we do to improve the post office?

First, stop trying to kill it. Though the post office does not receive funding from the government, government imposes extraordinary restrictions on it.

In 2006, Congress passed The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act requiring the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future.

No other private company or federal agency has to pre-fund retirement health care benefits. If they did, many corporations would run huge deficits or tumble into bankruptcy. Without these retiree health payments, USPS would have reported operating profits.

Congress has also limited the post office’s ability to invest in anything but U.S. Treasury Bonds and prohibits it from offering additional services, like banking.

Let postal vehicles be of even greater service.

Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government suggests, “The Postal Service’s fleet of vehicles — the largest in the country — could be equipped to detect air pollutants and report potholes, water leaks, and other infrastructure repair needs.”

Make the post offices local meeting places with free wifi, and connect them to libraries?

In many small towns, the local post office continues to be a community hub, a place to meet neighbors and get news.

They could be connected to laundromats, telephone services, community centers, shared places to read the news. They could have rocking chairs. They could have day care centers and senior centers. It could be great.

Appreciate the post office for its incredible accomplishments and potential.

As Sarah Anderson and Brian Wakamo write in Inequality.org, “Rather than the story of a Postal Service facing dire financial straits, it is time we see the Postal Service for what it really is: a well-loved public institution that has risen to every challenge and innovated its way to new services even in the face of an unprecedented congressional mandate. All the while it has delivered high-quality jobs, in big cities and small towns across the country — all without a dime of taxpayer money.

What can you do to save the post office?

Call them. Sign this petition. And this one. And this one.

Join the campaign for postal banking.

Learn how to vote by mail in all 50 states.

Call our elected representatives.

Buy stamps here and write post cards to:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Sources and Further Reading:

9781594205002: How the Post Office Created America: A History - AbeBooks - Gallagher, Winifred: 1594205000

The United States Postal Service: An American History: (Free PDF) https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100.pdf

Who We are Postal History. Printable history booklet from USPS: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/desktop-printable-history-booklet.pdf

Slate Magazine: Postal Banking Already Worked In The USA and It Will Work Again https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/08/postal-banking-already-worked-in-the-usa-and-it-will-work-again.html

What We Lose When We Privatize The Postal Service https://www.foreffectivegov.org/blog/what-we-lose-privatized-postal-service

• The Postal Service Deserves a Permanent Bailout
• The "Six-Triple Eight" Proved That No Role Was Too Small During WWII
• Paving the way: The 6888th all-female, all-black unit inspires others
• This Black Women-Only WWII Unit Has Been Honored With A Monument

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covid-19-mail-trump-postal-service-20200411.html

• Trump to U.S. Postal Service: Drop Dead
• Bernie Sanders's Highly Sensible Plan to Turn Post Offices Into Banks
• How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis - And How to Fix it
• You've Got Less Mail: The Postal Service Is Suffering Amid The Coronavirus
• Trump's grudge against the US Postal Service is a threat to the US election

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-workers-20thc.ht

mMost Recent Fiscal Report for U.S Postal Inspection Service

Historian
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Washington, DC 20260–0012

The historian maintains Postmaster Finder, the Postal Service’s national historic record of postmasters by Post Office, online at http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postmasterfinder/. The historian’s staff can provide guidance in researching specific aspects of postal history. Upon request, the historian’s staff can provide the names and appointment dates of postmasters who have served at particular Post Offices, Post Office establishment and discontinuance dates, and the dates of any Post Office name changes. Response time varies with the number of requests received.

The historian also manages the Postal Service’s collection of historical material, including the Annual Report of the Postmaster General since 1789, Postal Laws and Regulations since 1794, the United States Official Postal Guide from 1874 to 1954, and the Postal Bulletin since 1880. (Exact titles vary.) The collection is open to the public by appointment.

http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postmasterfinder/

Home | Library of Congress

The Library’s Geography and Map Division has early post route, railroad, and other historical maps. From www.loc.gov, search for “map collections.”

National Postal Museum
Smithsonian Institution
2 Massachusetts Avenue NE
Washington, DC 20002–9997
www.postalmuseum.si.edu

Railway Mail Service Library
117 East Main Street
Boyce, VA 22620–9639
www.railwaymailservicelibrary.org

The Railway Mail Service Library has artifacts, mail route schedules, schemes of mail distribution, and publications relating to the Railway Mail Service/Postal Transportation Service. The library is open by appointment and handles requests by mail.

American Philatelic Research Library www.stamplibrary.org

• Research Sources - Who We Are - USPS
• 10 Things You Didn't Know About the United States Postal Service - Online Shipping Blog | Endicia
• A big day in the history of the United States Postal Service
• 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion
• Special delivery by sled dogs
• The Quiet Heroism of Mail Delivery
• In Blow to Privatizers, House Passes Postal Financial Relief
• Opinion | What's an Essential Service in a Pandemic? The Post Office
• How to Vote by Mail in All 50 States
• The Recount
• USPS could privatize as early as 2020
• The Lazlo Letters | On the Media | WNYC Studios

How To Draw A Bunny: Ray Johnson documentary directed by John Walter https://vimeo.com/110857936

Subscribe to Hermette Magazine by clicking here. It’s the first magazine to celebrate the hermit lifestyle. It’s free and so are you.

Why The Post Office Is Even More Awesome Than You Think It Is. was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

fiction by Risa Mickenberg

The strongest force in the universe isn’t gravity. It’s jealousy. At night, my husband is always out, bouncing radio waves off the stars, looking through a telescope into the deep past. Seeing what man has never seen. While I sit at the kitchen table reading the back of a Celestial Seasonings tea box. The box quotes George Washington Carver: “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.” And I see: I’m jealous of my husband’s relationship with the universe.

Nights, he works at the Very Large Array, an astronomical radio observatory. Twenty-seven giant radio dishes in a Y in the desert, in-between Socorro and Pie Town, New Mexico, an hour from each and next to nothing: that’s why we’re here. He needs to be away from interference.

If you want a laugh, take a Google Street View tour of Socorro by day: motor lodges and Bank of America, liquor stores and parking lots, the Mission, the Circle-K supermarket and the Sonic and, boom, you’re back on the road, surrounded by dead volcanoes.

That is, if the Street View works. Often, the picture breaks up into a digital bouquet of fiber optics. One of the world’s most powerful radio observatories fucks things up on earth. I can tell you that.

The Circle-K is cold and it’s somewhere to go. In the meat aisle, I see a sign that says Special Flap Meat. I take a picture of it with my phone so I can try to make him laugh. Maybe I’ll surprise him with it for dinner.

Judging from the air-conditioned aisles at the Circle-K, it seems like people here survive on cheap meat and rice and beans and Slim-Fast and frozen things that melt in your car on the drive home.

There’s precious little around here in the way of fruit or leafy greens but there’s uranium and silver and coal and gold and coal and crude and pumice and potash and mica and the mining college and the reservation and the border police and pit bulls tied up in yards.

When I met my husband, the idea of dating an astronomer seemed sexy. It was beyond my grasp: all of it. The atomic weight of anything, the awesomeness of our insignificance. That I knew none of that didn’t seem to matter to him in the salad days, back in Providence, in the beginning.

Back at our rental home, I put away the groceries. My contributions to our marriage: my folded garbage bags, our vacuumed carpet, cleanliness of our sheets, the cleanliness of our temporary housing house, they’re my in-his-face sacrifice. He can’t eat and sleep without feeling it: the blatant, wasted human potential of me.

My husband’s on a quest for extraterrestrial knowledge and I’m on a quest for attention. Both make you feel small, but his insignificance seems to suit him. He’s never been happier. More radiant. More distant. I hate it.

Sometimes I Google map other places at night- view the Street View of places we could have lived instead if he hadn’t “lucked out” by being here: Berkeley. Even New Haven.

By day, I paint screen grabs from my laptop while he sleeps. Gouaches on paper of my computer desktops: cluttered and text-heavy with too many open windows of ugly web pages and photo landscapes of other places and cheap, colorful icons against a NASA screen saver.

The sunsets here are spectacular in terms of their disappointment: he wakes up and gets in the shower to get ready for work and his mind is already elsewhere.

The local Socorro weekly rag tries to paint the town as having a “thriving art and music scene.”

Before we moved here, I thought I might partake, but early on, I found myself grossed out by the long-haired jam sessions and gallery openings with their inevitable sagebrush landscapes. I long for the civilized world of the artificial.

I’ve developed a bitter taste for Milky Ways. At night, while the real thing emits radio waves for his viewing pleasure, I bite my fun-sized version of it, hard from the freezer, and never enough. He either doesn’t notice I’m getting fat or he doesn’t say. Measurements are his thing, so he ought to know, if he were paying attention. Maybe I’m testing him. Maybe marriage is just a test.

Nearby, the government tests explosives. They blow up vans for first responders. They make pipe bombs and explode fertilizer. We are a hundred miles from where they did the Trinity test.

People celebrate chemicals in their town names here. Visit scenic Vanadium, New Mexico. Pack a lunch and explore what’s left of Old Chloride. Watch missile trails in the sky.

Predator drones fly overhead at night, looking for border jumpers and drug smugglers, not finding enough to justify the cost but, in Congress, they’re so popular, local Republicans say you could elect a drone president.

I sometimes watch my husband when he sleeps during the day. His back: that expanse that I love and hate, simultaneously. Shades down, sheets kicked off, his body sometimes twitching like a dog’s, dreaming of chasing black holes and white dwarves, I imagine, and I feel him pulling away from me and I think about how it’s all a mystery. I am not a down-to-earth person, but he makes me one. He doesn’t mean to, I know. It’s a big world but it’s a bigger solar system, a bigger galaxy, a bigger universe. And it’s lonely as shit when you think about it; when you’re in a space where that’s all you have time to do.

I’ve read that Einstein had theories first and proved them later. Loneliness either makes you intuitive or superstitious. I hate that I read my husband’s horoscopes. I hate that he probably doesn’t even know my sign.

Pre-Copernicus, astronomy, and astrology were the same thing. Then astronomy was proven measurable, and astrology became just an unproven belief: that the stars have some effect on mundane matters of the heart. Even if astrology can’t prove it, I’m here to tell you that they do.

I find myself believing in signs. Road signs that say things like It’s Time For A Change: Jiffy Lube. Handwritten on a pump: We Are Out Of Gas.

Spouses of astronomers are no fun at parties. We’re all bright; you’d think we’d connect, but we never do. While they discuss the “previously unimaginable smallness” of the planets orbiting Formalhaut, we eat hummus and talk about television. Other peoples’ kids tug at other peoples’ sleeves, wanting to go home. I tug at his.

I am a distraction to the ecstasy of understanding. I cook meat and watch him bang out the door and I am left with the Tonight Show.

It sucks to try to make a life in the outposts of great observatories, in the middle of nowhere, among nuclear testing sites and mineral mines and the darkness of army bases.

Sometimes, when he comes home, he tries to tell me what he’s seen. He’s ecstatic. I can’t possibly react the way I should. I know how impossible it must be to come home, after what he’s sees every night, to little old me. At least he tries.

I fall asleep on the sofa. I don’t remember what I dream.

There are these once-in-a-lifetime occurrences; that’s part of what he’s looking for. I respect the hell, and the heaven, or the heavens, out of it. However you’d say it. I do. I respect his powers of observation. So when he comes home this time, and I wake at the sound of the screened door, and, for the first time in a long time, he pulls me off the sofa and down onto the carpet that I keep meaning to steam clean and he shows me he still has imagination and longing and that I’m somehow involved, I understand that I matter.

We try to connect, not just collide. We keep our eyes open. I feel him trying to take me somewhere, trying to meet me somewhere beyond space and time, where only we could go, where no one else and nothing else could interfere. Where we were part of everything and all that jazz. He still had it in him to try to take me there, god bless him.

I try to put my petty, domestic resentments on the back burner, but sex is still the place for us where I am unable to make myself less than understood.

It’s clear: there is something bigger out there for him. Something that doesn’t try to bring him down and spend time wishing he would think about things as mundane as sour sponges in the sink, or us, or T.V., or me.

Like the planets orbiting his precious Formalhaut, I was smaller than I could have previously imagined. I was ashamed and properly insignificant. I don’t know why I wanted to be the brightest star in someone’s sky.

He came outside me. He knew I wanted him to. We were never going to reproduce. It was never his thing.

In the daylight of the bathroom, under the powerless shower, I knew it was over. I knew, and I knew he knew, and it was fine, and I knew that he knew that too. On earth, there’s no lonelier life than to be an astronomer’s wife. That much wasn’t beyond his comprehension.

The Astronomer’s Wife © 2019 by Risa Mickenberg. Published inDel Sol Review 2019.

The Astronomer’s Wife was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

THE SAVORY COLLECTION: A PROPOSAL FOR A RAMPED-UP LIPGLOSS FOR MODERN TASTES.

Tired of cloying, fruit-flavored lip gloss, or garden-variety flavors like mint?

While our palettes and our palates have matured, running the gamut from ink to squid ink, why should our lips still taste like artificial cherries and root beer?

For mouths that crave a more tasteful, worldly way to shine, this is epicurean gloss for the well-groomed gourmand.

Introducing The Savory Collection, by Gobsmack:

A collection of flavored lip glosses that are as adventuresome as your mouth is.

We wind up eating 30% of our lipstick anyway, so why not have a tasting menu of appetizing lip glosses that don’t just compliment your eyes, or your frock, but compliment any course of any dinner?

Taste the modern sophistication of adventuresome flavors like:

Radiccio

Bottarga

Quail Egg

Anchovy Butter

Seasonal, regional and foraged favorites like:

Fiddlehead

Ramp

Alpine Sorrel & Stinging Nettle

Purslane & Yarrow

Tempting Oil Flavors:

Olive

Almond

Pistachio

Macadamia

The Salty Sea Collection:

Quahog

Lobster Butter

Mouqueca

Bouillabaisse

Mae Un Tang

Uni

The Lakes:

Duck

Smoked Trout

Eel

The Meat Course:

Carne Asada

Rosemary Lamb

Sweetbreads

Jerk Goat

Grio

Pot Au Feu

For a happy hour epicurean experience on a budget, try lipgloss and wine pairings:

A Salted Trumpet Mushroom Gloss with a full-bodied Chardonnay or a white burgundy.

An Anchovy Butter Gloss with a while Burgundy.

And everything savory goes with Champagne.

What are our lips, but the most tender meats?

Why not compliment your own mouth instead of your clothing?

Think of your lips as crackers or mini crepes.

Your mouth isn’t just a way to communicate; it’s a way to pleasure yourself.

If you love to lick your lips after a Maine lobster dinner, why wouldn’t you love a lipgloss called Drawn Butter?

A menu of worldly gobsmacking kisser compliments with great mouth feel.

Gobsmack® invites you to an everyday tasting event where the most delicious things on the menu are your own lips.

***

The Savory Collection: Lipglosses by Gobsmack. was originally published in Hermette Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.