mail : undeliverable

see if you can follow this train of thought.

we were up north this weekend for a pair of shows on the ligurian coast. quite lovely, will post pictures. in any case, the guy who booked our shows was telling us about this one late night he was driving home and fell asleep at the wheel. no physical damage, just a totaled car, but i got to thinking (perhaps morbidly) that since i had never met him outside of booking shows, if something had happened to him that night, i would never have realized it. our only contact has always been through email (till this weekend), and i probably would have sent him 3-5 messages regarding us playing a show up north and then, having never heard back from him, i would have given up and moved on.

it is just kind of funny how email dictates our human contact. i thought of a friend of mine who died in a terrible, grotesque accident a few years ago. i sent an email friday afternoon to my houston listserv, telling them about a show i was having the following week. i then went camping that weekend and didn't have email or phone service. i didn't hear about the accident till sunday on my way home. it was a shock to get to the office on monday and check my inbox, only to find a message from him telling me how much he was looking forward to coming to the show and how he was bringing a lot of friends. the message was sent just a few hours before he died. it arrived instantly in my inbox, but i was already gone, too far away for it to catch me.

my uncle died this summer and he too was on one of my listservs. sometime this fall, after sending a message to my dallas crowd, i got one of those e-postmaster "mail undeliverable" messages. a weird, robotic reminder that his email address had expired or been canceled, due to inactivity. obviously.

all this from davide telling us how he nodded off at the wheel late one night.
italy offers free coffee to drivers between the hours of midnight and 5 am. seems like a good idea to me.
love
vanessa