Aha! Aha! Ahahahaha! Ahhhhhhhhhh-HA!!!
They have shown their hand and I have them now!
"Who?" you ask.
Who else -- those fuckers down at the POST OFFICE!
Kids, take a word of advice from an old pro: If you are going to gaslight someone, you have to go all IN! You cannot swerve, you cannot break, you cannot relax your total control of the matrix for even a heartbeat! You cannot BLINK!
The fuckers blinked.
A letter arrived. A letter addressed to me -- to the Post Ferma address. And there it sat, on the little shelf behind the tellers where I fucking knew the Post Ferma was held, but where the Mean Old Man refused to even look, insisting that we had to go downstairs behind, where they in turn insisted that we were nuts.
But the Mean Old Man was not there yesterday and the Generally Pretty Well-Meaning But Absolutely Not In Any Sort Of Hurry Whatsoever Lady, torn between her standing orders to tell us to go ask downstairs behind and her desire to reprimand us for waiting so long to pick up our mail, let the urge to reprimand get the better of her. (Admittedly, this did have an additional tasty layer of irony-laced icing on top.) And so she reached behind herself to the little shelf and forked over a letter from my friend Esther.
Ha! And so I have them now!
The Posta Ferma mail does come. It does come to the address we gave everyone. It comes to the Post Office upstairs and not downstairs behind. It does sit on the little shelf.
I know that there is absolutely nothing to be done with this newly won knowledge, but one must not be greedy. I have the truth now and, god help me, it will sustain me through the cold dark months ahead as we are again inevitably, repeatedly sent to check downstairs behind.
The Truth will warm us in the winter of our hearts.
(p.s. A sign up in the Post Office alerts us to the fact that they are on strike from December 15th through January 15th. It is interesting to note that this work stoppage makes absolutely no difference whatsoever because they are in a very real way kind of always on strike.)
