if an electric ass mailman
knocks at the door
but there’s nobody there
to let him in
does it make a sound?
When you’re a bike messenger, a real bike messenger, not a jimmy john or an uber eats or a panda express… …when you’re a bike messenger there’s a part of your brain that grows to absorb street addresses, numbers, letters, directionals and subtle clues that make a big difference. It all gets whittled down to a shorthand lexicon lingo spoken by those in the know and it fits like a glove or maybe a tea cozy over a 3-D map of the city that exists only in your brain.
you know
I know
you know
Just as the brains of baristas burn new neural pathways to absorb all the nonfat decaf no foam extra hot 3 sweet-n-low vanilla fucking bullshit without blinking an eye, keeping a straight face.
Your messenger brain is trained to visualize, categorize, optimize, epitomize the traveling salesman problem. Working it out in real time and space on two wheels with a satchel over your shoulder cutting through traffic and parked cars and pedestrians and MID ambassadors as well as legal secretaries, security guards, mom & pops, broken elevators and bad dispatchers.
I believe that that there part of my brain was exercised enough as a real messenger so that here & now it continues to kick ass as an electric ass mailman. Which is perhaps one reason why I’m constantly dumbfounded by the stupid little shit my current coworkers cannot seem to wrap their heads around. If you see the same things, the same numbers, the same addresses 10, 20, 50 times a day for years and years, how can it not sink in??? How can you not remember that shit??? Didn’t we talk about the UW Police Station yesterday? And the day before? And last week? And the week before that? 3939 University is not 3939 15th Ave. 3910 15th Ave is not 3910 Montlake Ave. 3751 Stevens is not 3715 Stevens. 4060 Stevens Way is not Box 4060… …and 4000 15th Ave doesn’t mean shit… …and so on and so on and so on
At that big state university on the Montlake Cut, each department is assigned a Box Number. With the combination of street addresses and box #s there's an infinitely variable amount of ways to fuck it up. A sloppy slurry of numbers. Add ignorance and apathy to taste. Sprinkle with dyslexia and serve at room temperature Monday through Friday.
just a bunch of pictures of 3939
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