Mercury After Midnight

To you, still awake after midnight,

Mercury keeps early hours. It clings so close to the sun that it sinks soon after dark, and it is never in the sky at midnight. When Mercury stays home, the city lights itself: headlamps, signs, the little row of bulbs that comes on when a band starts to tune up.

This letter comes from San Francisco, around September 1990, on cream recycled paper with the title painted in the pinstripe script bikers like. A cobalt-black wheel sits beside an engraving of a street running down to the sea and a faded fragment of a coral diner sign. In the corner, a gig-date box has been stamped but never filled in: here, the show is always tonight.

A poet wrote for people like these: "We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." — Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight (1874)

Welcome. Midnight is the best hour for letters. Leave us whatever the day had no room for, and we will post it slowly; when you fall asleep, the rain will read it over for you.

May every show be tonight

Storm Post Office

Around September 1990 · San Francisco