I’ve had this since I was in high school. Looking at it just now, I wondered why I thought it was funny. Then I remembered how much I was into the theme of “girls being mean to boys” as a teen, so maybe I liked it whether I thought it was funny or not.

A quick internet search for artist Joey Waldon reveals that he was a whacked-out and very talented artist, and this is probably the dumbest thing he ever drew. He had a regular comic in the Austin Chronicle, and also had a career as a standup comedian. He died in 2013. RIP, Joey, I hardly knew ye.

I think about The Thinker more as an idea or a meme, than as a hunk of material. Objectively, it’s a statue, measuring 28 1/4 x 14 3/8 x 23 1/2 inches, but I hate objectivity. The Thinker is not thinking about me at all, but if he was, he would probably also not think about me in terms of my finite physical proportions.

I spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian as a kid, but not at the National Gallery of Art. My guess is that this was a cross-sell postcard that ended up in the wrong museum. Either that or I went there myself at some point and scored this swell souvenir. Life is long and I’ve done lots of stuff, tough to remember it all sometimes.

According to the back of this postcard, the Hendersonville Dutch Inn has all the modern conveniences, including pool, tv, switchboard service and “dining elegance.” My only question is how long you have to stay (or how long you have to work there) before you get to go inside the windmill.

I don’t know where I got this. I’ve always had it. I was born with it pasted to the back of my skull.

I was a dedicated cigarette smoker for about a decade. I smoked a pack a day (unfiltered for a long while), and had crazy lighters and cigarette holders, fancy ashtrays: I was really good at it. My friend Jonny Outlaw and I quit for Bastille Day, 1997. Then exactly (?) a year later, we were driving across country to move to L.A. and started again. That was dumb. It took me another year or so (and awful threats from my then-future wife) to quit permanently after that.

In L.A. (and probably other major cities) they had these GoCard kiosks, where they’d have a dozen or so designs of postcards, all for free because they were advertising. I grabbed them anytime there was something good, and multiple copies if they were great.

This is kind of an obnoxious idea for a blog. I just want to go through my postcard collection that I started when I was a kid and drop off some random thoughts having to do with the picture on the card and/or where I got it. Fans of serious postcard discussion or nuanced research are given fair warning that apart from giving credit where it’s due, I don’t care, and things are bound to get personal and subjective and (if you really like this image) disturbingly modern.

I got this at a record store somewhere, probably the Penny Lane on the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, and I think it’s probably in like the top 5 most beautiful photographs of all time. I like it because the girl looks like a girl on the front of an easy listening album. I don’t know why I find these old-time glamour shots so appealing, so much moreso than stuff these days. Even just saying that makes me feel older than your dead great-great-grandpa.

I welcome comments from other human persons. And welcome to postangle.