I once entered a contest to embark on an epic Final Fantasy themed adventure.
Nintendo Power1 was running the contest. Back in 1990, they invited all the little children and fat adults to send in letters explaining why they should be chosen as one of four Warriors of Light. I was keen on the opportunity, and it was obvious to all my application was the only reasonable choice. I was a shoo-in. It was in the bag. Only the formality of mailing the thing remained.
Nintendo Power would soon be rubber stamping my self-evident excellence and I’d be swept off to an exotic island adventure replete with pirates, treasure, and dragons.
I found an envelope, stuffed my application letter into it, wrote the address and return address - I knew both my own and Nintendo's by heart - licked a commemorative stamp with a pin-up girl on it, and mailed it off. The good news couldn't come soon enough, and I wagered when it did, it would come in the mail. That acceptance letter would definitely arrive, and I would be off slaying dragons before I knew it.
Except it never showed. I waited and waited by our mailbox like a sad, caffeinated puppy. But the mailman only brought my parents’ mail. Since there was no possibility of rejection - I'd spent long minutes extolling my virtue in the letter - a nagging doubt blossomed into suspicion. Someone had sabotaged me with malice aforethought.
My young, brilliant mind spun around thoughts of revenge, I mean justice obviously, against those who had spurned me. That son of a bitch mailman had stolen my acceptance letter. It was the only reasonable explanation. Under the weight of wrong, my heart ached for right and before long, I'd see it done. I was going to slay a dragon, one way or another, and any dragon would do.
I just wasn't sure how yet. But I’d light upon it before too long.
I attended elementary school about a mile away from my home. I walked, or rode a bicycle, to and from there every day for as long as I can recall. Maybe from second grade to sixth, when my parents determined to salvage my soul by sending me to the Catholic school much further down the road. For some reasons I’m sure are unrelated to this story specifically or my behavior in general.
But before being saved by men in dresses tossing water and wine around, I was happily free to roam my neighborhood before and after school. My parents both worked, probably saving for Catholic school, so I enjoyed a liberty I’m told kids don’t possess today.
I don’t know if this is true or not. It doesn’t seem to be, considering most days I catch kids setting fireworks off from the hood of my car or find Oreo flavored ice cream sandwich smeared on the door handles. All I know is my cats aren’t allowed outside due to feral children prowling the neighborhood.
One afternoon, I walked the mile from school to home unsupervised as I always did. Except this time, I noticed just how unsupervised I was. I popped open a mailbox, having always wondered what was in a strange one. Mail, it turns out. I'd found a kindred soul in that small stack of letters, a fellow unsupervised thing, and decided it was better off in my possession and in my charge.
Drawing my inspiration from who knows where, I stuffed the envelopes into my bag alongside a nearly rotten banana. My mother was always trying to get me to eat bananas for some reason. But dragonslayers don't eat bananas.
As I walked home, it occurred to me if one mailbox was full of mail, perhaps another would be as well. My reasoning then, as it is now, was rock solid and I proceeded to fill my bag to the brim, thieving correspondence from several boxes. I pilfered no packages. I probably didn't find any. I never even opened an envelope, nor looked at the addresses upon them. I wasn't a monster. I was a treasure goblin, my back burdened by the weight of justice. And loot. And revenge. I think the kids at Stanford call this retributive justice.2
This would show the mailman who was boss. My neighbors would all think he was stealing their mail like he was definitely stealing mine. Sure, I was setting him up. Sure, I was lying with my greedy, little hands. But justice is messy. Eggs get broke or something, I don’t know. Much more importantly, the thrill of applied justice through theft kept me focused on the big picture.3
When I got home, I realized I needed a place to stash my stash. I emptied its contents in the back of the pantry behind some cans which seemed as old as I was and unlikely to move anytime soon. My crime was complete. No one was getting any mail that day in a two-block radius around my house. The mailman was well and truly cooked.
Unfortunately, as the weeks went by and my one-boy social justice campaign continued long passed its sunset period, my stash began to resemble a hoard. I couldn’t tuck it behind something any longer. Over time and with consistent effort, it had become the thing you tuck something else behind.4
This went on for three weeks and none suspected my part in the sabotage. But over time, the visceral high of theft - I mean justice - gave way to hubris. I got sloppy. The thing got away from me. I’d gone too far. The first sign I'd gone too far was getting caught. The constant, unalloyed application of what my detractors called injustice in order to remedy a former injustice also rendered me vaguely reptilian in shape and scent.5
The jig was up when my parents found me curled atop Mt. Undelivered Mail. It was probably the smell of smoke from my nostrils that gave me away. Or the rank scent of several uneaten, rotting bananas. I'm unsure. But in either olfactory event, my naive treasure goblin innocence had metamorphized into a vaguely human shaped wyrm.
I'd curled too hard around justice and became the thing I hated. Crap, I knew this was actually about revenge.
I told all this to everyone I'd stolen mail from. My parents demanded it. Mostly this story, but also an apology alongside returning the reams of mail. I went house to house and said sorry in the form of a story.6 It was a hit. Only a few neighbors chased me off with a stick. Some were just like that. No sense of humor when it comes to federal felony. But the real blow arrived after reporting to my mother I had returned it all from whence I liberated it.
“Not all the mail,” she said, handing me an envelope and yet another banana. “Eat this one, please. And where'd you get that sticker of the lady? That's not a stamp.”
Taking the strangely familiar letter and stuffing the uneaten banana in my bag, I read the envelope adorned in my own handwriting and cried in my stout, eight-year-old boy voice, “Holy shit! That son of a bitch mailman never mailed it!”
Over the next weeks, grounded at home for speaking freely and I guess stealing an entire neighborhood’s worth of mail, I had plenty of time to think about how the US Postal System doesn't work and what exactly the gods damned mailman did wrong. Quite a bit. Worse, I worry he didn’t learn a gods damned thing from any of this.
Sic vivitur.
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Nintendo Power was the most dope gaming magazine around in 1990 and that same year, the first of several dozen supposedly Final Fantasy games was released in the United States. Thirty installments later, I don’t think they know what final means at all.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says retributive justice is the focus on punishment as a means of preventing criminal behavior. They call it problematic, which is how you know no one has ever stolen their mail or murdered them.
Jonathon Cleese once exclaimed, “A lesser discussed positive benefit of extremism is that it feels very good.” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing a comedy genius because I think I know how to make his sentence flow better.
A lot like my first wife. Hiyo!
“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Ibram X. Kendi wrote this in his How to Be an Antiracist book. His entire philosophy is telling haters to hate harder. Some people stare into the abyss and say, “Heil ja!”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says corrective justice is the focus on undoing wrongdoing by forcing the victimizer to make the victim whole again. I’m paraphrasing, because these people are lawyers, who are apparently paid by the word. Unlike myself, who is apparently not paid at all.
Fun storytelling! Gave me some chuckles. I'm also a federal offender. I think I was 9 or 10 and another kid and I went around stealing mail at an apartment complex where we lived. I think we were looking for checks because obviously we had no idea about how any of that worked but we thought we could get free money or something. We were caught red-handed, and I'll never forget a cop telling us it was a "federal offense." That sounded bad. We cried, and they let us off with a warning. My parents never found out.