From Wikipedia:

“Going Postal in American English slang, means becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence, and usually in a workplace environment.

Going Postal derives from a series of incidents from 1983 onward in which US postal Service workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder.“

And now for something completely different, Going Postal – the book:

From the publisher website:

Postal stickers have long been a preferred substrate used by street artists to get up. Of course, because stickers from the US Postal Service, UPS, DHL and FedEx are so readily available, most of these stickers get lost in the fray, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

That’s where graffiti photography legend Martha Cooper comes in. Cooper’s well-trained eyes know how to recognize deft sticker art. Here then is a collection of more than 200 photographs of some of Cooper’s favorite handmade postal stickers from around the world, done by some of the scene’s better-known artists and the anonymous.

Going Postal documents how an old-school method has burgeoned into another rich facet of the world’s graffiti cultures.

This is not to be confused with the excellent book by one of my favorite authors Terry Pratchett – Going Postal.

And now for your moment of zen:

D.

So many of the characters were in one time or another using some sort of writing to fill a gap in their lives.

There is the grandmother how as a child asked people to write her letter, the grandfather how use writing instead of talking, an old reporter who made a catalog of people, each categorieses in one word, and the grandson how documents his life in a  journal and embarks on a journey after finding an envelope with one work on it.

Besides these there are other more or less common ways of communicating described in the book. A walkie-talkie , a flashlight, stones thrown on a window, a note on the window and more.

In the book, the writing may be replacing something that is missing in the characters life, it is sometime a way of communicating with the world, and sometime a way to understand it.

I was thinking why letters are so important to me. Of course there is the message and the time and effort people are putting in to them, but you can get that from an Email as well.

The answer, I have to say, is that letters are one of a kind. There is the hand writing that is unique to that person, and also the fact that they cannot be duplicated. They will not be sent in syndication to a mailing list, and no one except me has the same letter.

That is what truly makes them a work of art.