Won't You Smile A While For Me?
Sometime very recently I had to go to the post office. It wasn't just any post office, though; it was the holiday post office. The exterior of the holiday post office is in the same physical location as the old post office, but they move the interior to the other side of the river Styx. Once you make it past the threshold and the three-headed dog, they issue you your own boulder to roll uphill through the slowly moving line. All your senses are assaulted here. For your eyes, there is the fluorescent lighting, which flickers like the flames of Hades. For your nose, the air is thick with a sulphury smell that could be either the fiery pits or the sweaty guy in line in front of you. For your ears, your internal voice will scream out in pain as you overhear conversations around you about family problems and work plans.
Or you usually have to hear these things. On this particular visit, there was a radio playing behind the counter and it was keeping people quiet and motionless, as if they had recently been pithed. The radio was tuned to the Smooth Jazz station and it was playing "Sara Smile" by Hall & Oats, which you'll note may be smooth, but is nothing like jazz. I leaned into my boulder, which suddenly felt much lighter, and found myself enjoying it. And I wasn't the only one. The overweight postal worker, who moved as if suspended in a particularly viscous liquid, was also enjoying it. In fact, she sang along with it. She and my internal voice did a little duet.
"That's what I want to do," my internal voice said to me between verses. "I want to write a song that is so good that all the world's postal workers can't help but sing along. Just look at how much better this song is making this situation!" My internal voice almost never uses exclamation points, so you can tell it was pretty jazzed (smooth jazzed, to be precise). Then the song ended, quickly followed by a sweeper and a gum commercial. Without missing a beat, the postal worker sang along with the gum commercial. Suddenly my boulder felt heavy again and I was back in the real world. The quality of the song didn't matter to her. She would sing along with anything. My internal voice wept a little.
*********************************************
This week's links involve the Canadian She-Devil.
Or you usually have to hear these things. On this particular visit, there was a radio playing behind the counter and it was keeping people quiet and motionless, as if they had recently been pithed. The radio was tuned to the Smooth Jazz station and it was playing "Sara Smile" by Hall & Oats, which you'll note may be smooth, but is nothing like jazz. I leaned into my boulder, which suddenly felt much lighter, and found myself enjoying it. And I wasn't the only one. The overweight postal worker, who moved as if suspended in a particularly viscous liquid, was also enjoying it. In fact, she sang along with it. She and my internal voice did a little duet.
"That's what I want to do," my internal voice said to me between verses. "I want to write a song that is so good that all the world's postal workers can't help but sing along. Just look at how much better this song is making this situation!" My internal voice almost never uses exclamation points, so you can tell it was pretty jazzed (smooth jazzed, to be precise). Then the song ended, quickly followed by a sweeper and a gum commercial. Without missing a beat, the postal worker sang along with the gum commercial. Suddenly my boulder felt heavy again and I was back in the real world. The quality of the song didn't matter to her. She would sing along with anything. My internal voice wept a little.
*********************************************
This week's links involve the Canadian She-Devil.
6 Comments:
Nice Justin. The duet reminds me of the Colbert Show when Colbert is interviewing John Hall (former band member of Orleans, and US Congressman, D-NY). Colbert confuses him as Daryl Hall too.
You have to give the jingle writer credit for the advertisement sing along because of course that's exactly the intended result.
By Mennen
love this from your link
(As another critic once put it: “I think most people would rather be processed through the digestive tract of an anaconda than be Céline Dion for a day.”)
I don't think that our post office experiences could be any different....
I have spent about $800 at the post office here in the past week or so, getting super cuddly with the impulsively expressive racist and retarded gem of a specimen who is the postmaster here. The same postmaster who falls into the fire at bonfires here, siting over and over again that everyone is partying with a federal employee....
And she has a cd player in the post office, that plays pretty much only music from the Abyss of crap that was the top 40 80's. I am always the only one at the post office. I tolerate her, and she confides in me that she hates this place and that it's so cold her ovaries are frozen and I decide not to ask her if she knows what ovaries are. Instead, I haul boxes up onto the counter. Listen to her try to relate to me with garbage that stinks worse than the rotten fox corpses littering the village dump.. and I try to get lost in her music...
Today..
It was a little ditty about Jack and Diane, and even though all I want to do is puke, I hold it in.
It took 12 days for my mail to actually leave this post office do to high winds and blizzards...
Wait, why am I telling you this. You never had sympathy for my plight. Scratch everything.
I liked the creative torch you lit this post with.
I forgot to mention how the postmaster here called me at home on Saturday night to see if I wanted to come to her house and play some Wii with her.
She called me because everyone else hates her and she hates everyone else, but for some reason she likes me..
When was the last time your local postmaster called you to party? That was my original point.. and not much of point I am afraid..
I wanted to ask you what the american dollar did for you in Paris. I imagine it didn't do much but empty your wallet for nothing in return.
The postal worker wouldn't sing along with just anything. Sara Smile and the gum commercial both rock.
Kicking,
I'm not sure how my dollars would have fared in Paris, as I was in a small village just north of Toulouse. Things are more or less the same price there in euros as they are here in dollars, so it's easy to forget that you're paying 50% more for everything--until later when you look in horror at your credit card statement.
Dot,
I would also like to believe that my postal worker is more selective, but after she crushed my little dream I'm almost certain that she's not. Call me cynical.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home