Postcard Club

Sep 22, 2023

I know how this is going to sound, so please stick with me knowing this: I’m not high.

But…it’s pretty crazy that we’re here, isn’t it, sharing this digital space together? I think it’s crazy that it’s even a possibility, let alone something we’re doing right this second.

Email, after all, is 52 years old at the time of this writing. The internet is 40. When you consider that Homo sapiens have been on this planet for about 300,000 years, those numbers represent a single blink of a single eye.

Zoom out even further to remind yourself that earth is 4.5 billion years old, and our entire existence as a species equates to the single blink of a different eye—thus reducing our aforementioned inventions, cute as they are, to the teeniest, tiniest fraction of a blink.

My point being: the tools we’re using to meet right here, and right now, as old hat as they might feel to us at times, are indeed very, very new. They’re awesome. They’re powerful, capable of great things. I mean, I’m writing this in Seattle, Washington, and I know that the second I hit “Send” it’ll go out to anyone who has subscribed regardless of where they live on the planet. One click and boom, there it is.

That’s wild!

Yet… I’m of the belief that these digital relationships of ours shouldn’t be our everything.

Great as they can be, we shouldn’t live just digital lives, and forge and maintain digital relationships. We just can’t. I think we as individuals, and we as a species, lose a little bit of ourselves the more attention we give to our profiles, and our personas, and our avatars. Over time, I think we forget about who we are and where we’ve come from. What makes us, us.

But these digital spaces, these digital relationships, they aren’t going away. And that’s largely a good thing, because they aren’t evil. I certainly don’t want them to go away.

I think perhaps we should aim not for digital relationships to dominate our social lives, but instead for them to be entry points to connecting with one another on a deeper level, in the physical world.

That’s where I hope Postcard Club can step in.

A postcard featuring Lake Washington (near Seattle) in 1907. What’s interesting to me about this is that the sender wrote, “Their Coney Island here. Elden.” Why that’s interesting to me is that the first name given to the area by white settlers in 1851 was, very, very unoriginally “New York.” They then added “Alki” so that it read “New York-Alki.” Alki is Chinook Jargon for “By and by” or “eventually” and what Indigenous peoples called the land upon which the settlers—some of whom were from New York—first decided to settle. (If you’re still reading, sorry for the brief detour. I won’t be finding and sending old postcards through Postcard Club, I just found this one in the public domain, found it interesting and wanted to share. Onward!)

What is Postcard Club Then?

In short, a way for you and me to connect in the physical world.

I’ll send a fun and unique postcard each quarter to those who have signed up. Each postcard will be designed by me, addressed by me, and mailed by me.

What designs? What messages?

Any? All?

The only plan I have here is to not really have a plan. One quarter maybe I send a postcard entirely from the perspective of a character of mine (even the handwritten message). Another quarter, maybe I send something about the weather.

In other words: it’ll be dictated by the moment, by what’s going on in my life at that time.

And, because each one will be printed in what’s called a “limited run,” they really are unique, and they’ll remain unique because there won’t be any additional printings of that design.

To give you an idea of what the postcards are like, here are a few recent examples:

Will this cost me anything?

At this time, no, and I hope to keep it that way. Because Postcard Club isn’t meant to put any sort of stress on you in the slightest; it’s something I want to offer to fans as a way to connect quasi-IRL, wherever you live.

(If I had the means to do so, I’d love to travel to a town near you and grab a coffee or something. Because that isn’t possible at this time, this’ll have to do!)

And also, in the event that my writing starts reaching a wide audience, those who supported me from the jump will have what I think are going to be some cool collector’s items.

(Cha-ching.)

The upcoming schedule

Below is a list of months members of Postcard Club will receive their mailings:

September 2024
December 2024
March 2025
June 2025

Sign up

Ooookay. Ready to sign up? Below is the link to the Google Form.

If you have any trouble, just shoot me an email and I’ll help in any way I can.