He mailed them separately—each with my address on a label and each with a stamp. Each has been hand-cancelled in San Diego with a stamp that includes four bold parallel lines. The coasters show some signs of wear from riding through the mails, and I pulled extra tiny bits of the paper off when I removed the 12-cent postage due stickers the postal service added to tell us these were odd-sized mailings that required additional postage. (I wonder why the postal service bothers to put on these stickers, since they haven’t asked me to pay the postage due in years!)
What I think is the first coaster in the series includes correspondence written just inside its circumference: “Drinking Sharkbite in a beach bar on a [four bold black bars] the new barmaid from Holland. — . . — kiyotei.” I assume kiyotei wrote this in the Pizza Port in Carlsbad, California, but there’s also a Pizza Port in San Clemente on El Camino Real, the same road that runs through my putative hometown, Millbrae, California.
On the back (bottom) of this coaster is a wonderful drawing approximating Japanese packaging art.
Another one of these coasters includes a semi-asemic design that includes a stylized version of my first name.
On the last coaster is a weirdly great haiku of the moment:
un violon d’ingres
3 comments:
Ahhhh...
3 out of 4 made it to you- good news.
One is lost in the mails.
12 cents more? wow I thought the 37 cents was more than adequate.
Take care my friend.
Hope the orphaned coaster finds it way to you eventually.
kiyotei
kiyotei,
Ah, I wondered if there might have been more of these coasters. I'll be on the lookout for the last one, but I'll probably be gone from home before the mail arrives today.
Geof
I love the drunk haiku. Love. It.
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