Post Secret

Before I get going, let me give big props to the always-entertaining blog Slack LaLane for this link:

This is amazing. Sometimes the Internet can really give you chills.

It's an art project where...well, I'll just let the site explain itself:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project. People from around the world share their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Yeah, it's homemade postcards, mostly with odd or idiosyncratic designs on them, onto which people have written their deepest, darkest secrets.

I recall another site like this, grouphug.us. That was a site that encouraged people to anonymously submit personal confessions that would then by anonymously posted. But the problem there was, it was so easy to submit confessions, people starting gaming the system. Sending it fake or jokey confessions just to see them on the website. And the whole thing has kind of imploded.

But Post Secret is so much more promising. Because you have to spend the time to make your own postcard and design it, and because only the most provocative or interesting cards make the website, there's a really tremendous amount of insight into humanity on display. Here are few samples:



I like this artwork a whole lot. It's just realistic enough to be eerie.



As a child, I remember considering this possibility...If I write a postcard to my grandmother, couldn't anyone at the post office just read it and know what I was saying? But then I thought better of myself...I figured there must be some people at the post office whose job it was to watch the employees and make sure they don't read anyone's mail.

Looking back on that now, I'm astonished to realize that, while I was a little naive to assume that no postal employee would read something just because it was in front of them, I had a pretty solid handle on the typical working conditions in the American office. Obnoxious assholes hover around you all day looking over your shoulder, trying to catch you doing something wrong.



I kind of doubt the veracity of this postcard. Could it possibly be true? Wouldn't it be great if it was? I mean, that's a story...A man disappears on 9/11 in New York, everyone assumes he was in the WTC...he gets to just start a new life from scratch! Somewhere in there is, like, the great novel of our times, but I'll probably just keep blogging for right now.



This one hits kind of close to home for me. Not becuase I believe I'm going to Hell. There's obviously not a Hell. At least, there's not a Hell the way we think of Hell, which is a red place filled with fire and trolls and imps and naked bodies rolling around in sulfur and demons and for some weird reason, in a lot of Renaissance art, eggs. I get that it's a symbol of rebirth or something, but still, that's just weird.

But I consider sometimes that my status as an atheist puts me in direct philosophical opposition to, oh, let's say 99.9999% of the country, and a pretty massive slice of the world population as well. I'm not afraid to burning in a lake of fire forever, but if there's any truth at all behind any of the major world religions, it does mean something really bad for me. It means the world as I understand it doesn't exist.

So, that's just a small sample of the dozens of these postcards featured on the site. As a civic art project, it's actually a pretty terrific idea. Certainly more interesting than those performance artists who poop on the American flag or sit in a box for a few days or something. Although, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind seeing a performance artist poop on an American flag. It would make one hell of a blog post.