The City Never Parks

To all who won't cut the engine,

The city never quite parks. Motorcycles idle at the curb, buses wheeze up the hills, and the coffee cups at the corner are always half washed.

This letter comes from San Francisco, around September 1990, in a dusty lavender-gray kraft envelope. The title is a gig poster shouting in huge, rough, condensed black letters. Around it sit a torn corner of sheet music, olive street-map panels, a coral motorcycle-rally tag pasted at a slant, screen-printed tire tread, and a tiny diner coffee emblem.

Nobody says you must keep anyone else's time. A man who lived in a cabin by a pond wrote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Welcome. Here you may write to your own beat: scrawled, cut and pasted, the same sentence copied three times. The letter will not hurry you, and neither will the rain.

See you at the curb

Storm Post Office

Around September 1990 · San Francisco