The Dead Letter Room Explained

So here I am with my second post of the year. And I think I'm already finding it difficult to keep on schedule. :P Although, that discovery has nothing to do with my posting so late in the "day". I'm naturally a night owl, so more often than not I think I'll be making my posts late in the night/early in the morning. So while it's technically Saturday morning, I'm counting this post toward my Friday update. Also, in keeping with my Net Handle I'll try my best to get these posts out at 3:33am on the dot. But we'll see how that goes.

Tonight I thought I'd delve into the meaning or origin of my Blog Heading, Dead Letter Room. In fact, you'll find most of these early posts to be a kind of tour into the world of DS333. Expositions and such about all the things on this blog and in my life in general. Naturally, it seemed I'd tackle two obvious points of interest on this blog so far: it's heading and it's author (or at least the author's handle). So the Dead Letter Room is actually a reference to a prominent locale in the Books of The Art series written by Clive Barker. The Books of The Art (The Great And Secret Show and Everville) are by far, my two favorite fiction titles at the moment. I'd love to go into more detail about the series but that, I think, is worth its own post. The Dead Letter Room is essentially a room located within the Omaha Central Post Office in Omaha, Nebraska. On the surface, nothing too spectacular. Within the context of the story however, it represents a crossroads of sorts in America. An informational crossroads that in our modern day reckoning can be viewed as an allusion to the internet, the information superhighway.

It's that allusion that I find very intriguing, so much so that I thought it would make a great Blog Heading. That room, its reference and its symbolic meaning creates in my mind a great point of convergence of several ideas I find very interesting. For those who are unaware, "dead letters" are those letters that get lost in the shuffle of the US Postal Service. These letters, within the story, find themselves in the Dead Letter Room if they're mislabeled, or maybe improperly addressed, etc. They're circulated from one end of the coast, to the other until they find themselves in the Dead Letter Room. They're like whispers in the dark, shouts into the void or messages in bottles. The Dead Letter Room is essentially a nexus of lost information. The majority of that information isn't very important. Amid the flood of that information though, there are clues to a grand story not easily seen or heard. And it's that idea too, that I find interesting. I'm a huge consumer of media. It's what I love to do, immerse myself in any number of websites, articles, movies, music, etc. For the most part, casual consumption doesn't really bear any lasting rewards or insights. But I find the more media you do consume, you bring yourself closer to making connections in your life and in the world that you wouldn't have otherwise. There's this idea that the most trivial points of information aren't trivial at all, if they're allowed to gel with bits more substantive. Information at its most divine is a tapestry of support and structure. Each part of that complex is as important as any other because it helps to complete the whole. And yet I think we rarely appreciate the whole. It takes effort, time and patience to shift your focus, to gain a greater perspective.

Gee, I'm finding this blogging thing a bit hard. I don't have any real idea of where I want to go beforehand, or even while I'm in the thick of it. I don't think I'll be able to interpret the meaning of the Dead Letter Room right off the bat. But the great thing about this project is the amount of time I have to complete it. In time I think my point will come across. For now I'll just say that I would like for this blog to be like the "actual" Dead Letter Room. A gateway of sorts, to my world and yours. A gathering place for information; trivial and significant. For the most part it'll be nothing more than an outlet for all my little rants. I want it to be amorphous. They'll never be anything as formal as a mission statement because I wouldn't want to define or categorize anything that I create. I just want to throw out ideas and let them take shape as they will in the eyes of the readers.

I think I'll call it a day now. Hopefully tomorrow's post will prove to be a little more coherent. If not, you're not exactly forced to read any of this... so feel free to drop out any time. ;)