D•D•D

There are over 30,000 post offices in America. But in 1901, there were nearly 77,000. Some of the closed spaces include Dickpointer, WV, Zero, IA, and Trenton, MN. So we will not be stopping at these places along the way (obviously). I’ve hidden a sentence in each active post office. This is not, in fact, “every town.” I would like to visit “every town.” I’d like that very much. I'd like to hide sentences in places that aren’t post offices. But no one has been able to accurately create a list of “every town” in America. This seems impossible to me. Take Dickpointer, WV: not even a town at all. The Dickpointer P.O. was named after Dick Pointer, an American frontier hero and an enslaved African. He is best known for his bravery in the defence of Fort Donnally, in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, from a Shawnee attack in 1778. During the attack, he used a rifle to secure the front door against attackers. Some years later, Pointer spoke before the Virginia General Assembly, requesting his freedom in consideration for his act of bravery. He was emancipated in 1801. He died in 1827. The post office named in his honor existed for less than a year between 1900 and 1901. So there will be no sentence for Dickpointer because there is no Dickpointer. Only the fading memory of a man named Dick Pointer. You google “Dickpointer, WV” and you get Dick Pointer, the man: the town does not exist.

This is a good way to write a long novel. Because if you are able to locate every P.O. in America then your novel will be extremely long (probably close to ¼ of a million words, at least). Also, due to the fact that the only interesting part of the project is finding post offices to hide sentences in, you needn’t concern yourself with the quality of the writing itself. Of course I don’t mean you. I mean me. That’s a really good example of not caring about quality. Things like “tense” and “being grammatically correct,” not to mention “tone” and/or “style,” well, these concepts are of no concern. For when I place a sentence inside one of these buildings, these fading landmarks, symbols of a history in shambles, I’m placing them in an unknown tomb, destined for dust. There’s digital dust, I tell you, so much digital dust. You can see it if you’re looking for it. But most folks don’t look, couldn’t care less and wouldn’t know it if they were choking on it, and that’s alright. Like Dick Pointer’s rifle, they’ll be there when you’re ready for them.

I promise not to end any more paragraphs referencing Dick Pointer. In fact, that was the last sentence that will allude to him at all. Ole D.P. served his purpose (as a metaphor or whatever, say nothing of the real world violence against Native Americans which somewhat ironically led to his freedom). Time to be moving on. If there’s one place that I wish we could have spent more time in it’s got to be Fontanelle, Iowa. Once, a songwriter used the word “fontanelle” in the lyrics of a song. Let’s imagine this is true. Perhaps he rhymed it with “wishing well.” Webster’s Dictionary defines fontanelle as “the membrane-covered opening or soft space between the bones of a fetal or young infant's skull.” Perhaps the songwriter, when he became a scared new father, worried about this soft space, about a sharp (and/or blunt — there’s really no telling just how soft this space might be) object plunging through into his infant’s brain. The word, to many, probably just sounds like an Italian surname, but those who know know. This is how so much of the world works. Listen: sometimes it’s a baby getting brain damage and sometimes it’s meatballs and organized crime.

I googled for a quarterback named Fontanelle and came across one named Fontenette. Close enough. Perhaps he’s Italian. He’s definitely not a baby. He hails from Freeport, TX and played high school ball for Brazosport. I had sports on the brain so, naturally, I assumed this was some portmanteau of “brazo” and “sport” but it’s actually “Brazos” (as in the Brazos River) and “port” (duh). Incidentally, their football stadium is actually located within the city of limits of Clute, TX. Clute gained some fame with the discovery of a fossilized mammoth named Asiel. There’s even a diner named after it in nearby Lake Jackson. The skull of the mammoth is allegedly on display inside the restaurant, although this is not a factoid touted on their website. You would think if you had a giant mammoth skull, tusks and all, you’d want the world to know, right? Good thing I’m simply the author of a book written sentence-by-sentence inside pins on a digital map of randomly selected post offices and not a restaurateur. Fontenette is in his fourth year of college ball now, playing for the Colorado Buffaloes in Boulder, CO. He spent the previous two seasons at Vanderbilt in Tennessee and his first at TCU in Fort Worth, a solid five-hour drive north up from Brazosport. Good luck, Randon, in football and in life.

It has become such a bummer: getting into the part of the day where everything is free, anything is possible, and finding a big old ugly blank. So sad to me. Has the creative well run dry? What am I even into? What the hell do I want to do? What is the good shit and how do you make it? The doing is hard enough — when you don’t have the foggiest idea or spark of inspiration, it’s damn near impossible. You wind up downloading movies off of Russian YouTube all day. You don’t have enough time left on earth to watch all the movies you have downloaded off of Russian YouTube. I repeat: You don’t have enough time left on earth to watch all these movies! So what’s the point? It’s something to do. It’s maybe the least “do” that one can convey in the act of doing possible. If you stared at the clouds above the treeline for hours on end, it would be more productive. My lack of motivation — it’s more of an absence or abscess — makes me think of my friend, who lives in the town over: Oaklyn, NJ. I’m talking about Lex.

The idea to play public domain movies at the local theater was an impulsive one, for the most part. Lex thought it was a longshot they’d even get their foot in the door. But there Lex stood, toes a’tapping nervously behind the soundboard in the back of The Ritz Theater as the black-and-white British Board of Film Censors title card flashed before Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, the opening night of “It Came from the Public Domain!” — copyright-free feature films showing every Monday evening until Christmas in a room normally reserved for community stage productions. In fact, Peggy — The Ritz’s bubbly but aloof manager — couldn’t recall if they’d shown a single film since the space had been rescued in the mid-80s by a group of artists. But Lex was doing it. Lex had made this happen.

Built in 1927 for vaudeville and early cinema, the theater became a cultural hub in the 50s and 60s with its fine art and foreign film screenings. However — like many classic movie palaces in 1970s America — it slid into the sewer and became a porno house. By the start of the next decade, its marquee went dark.

The nine-film autumn schedule was more than a generous audition/introduction, though Lex had fought hard to program a weekly double feature instead of stand-alone films. What would have paired well with Meet John Doe? Lex wondered. Perhaps something else from 1941? Penny Serenade — the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant melodrama — perhaps could have worked tonally.

“I didn’t realize this was a British picture?” Skip, the sound and tech guy, whispered to Lex in an unfortunate cockney accent.

“Oh, umm,” Lex replied in an even quieter hush. “It’s not. The best print of the film was from an archive in the UK. So that’s the version we’re seeing. It’s an American movie.” Skip nodded graciously, clearly picking up on the vibe that the very nervous Lex was not interested in small talk whispers. Why didn’t he ask me this earlier? Lex had sent over the file — downloaded directly off Wikipedia — weeks ago and knew Skip had vetted it.

Lex became fixated on three patrons sitting in the back, just in front of the sound booth. A father was having a difficult time with his two kids: a small, maybe Kindergarten-age boy and a pre-teen girl. What the hell are they even doing here? Lex thought. This is not a movie for kids. Lex wanted nothing more than for them to simply leave, but the theater wasn’t even a third-full — a walk-out wouldn’t look good. This father was me. Lex and I weren’t friends just yet.

For her part, Peggy had reassured Lex that the pre-sale tickets were decent enough, on par with some of the lesser stage productions they put on. They’d squabbled somewhat at setting the ticket price. This was why Lex wanted to show two features (“more bang for their buck”) and charge more. Peggy felt like it was too big a commitment. “The audience doesn’t need to stay for both,” Lex had pleaded. In the end, she held all the cards so they opted for the wait-and-see approach.

As the movie started, Lex marveled at how good the 600MB file looked on the big screen and felt weirdly proud that it had come from Wikipedia. Later, when I pleaded that I could find a better version off of Russian YouTube, Lex would scoff. There was just something about Wikipedia: how it made the whole endeavor feel all the more public domain. The thing was: the projector was so high-end, it hardly mattered. Now the story of the projector, well, that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax entirely.