Paperwork

The envelope was full of little surprises. There were four tapes, each in their own wrap of paper, but I took also a green and a blue piece of paper out of the envelope. They were postcard size and also postcard weight. One was a very pale green with thin blue lines on it; the other was a very pale blue.

The top line on both of them was a bit thicker and of a red colour. In older days, when the pale was not yet so pale, the card might have been in use in public libraries, to write down the period within which you were allowed to take a book, followed by your membership number. So, for those who read faster than they can imagine or remember, these cards were very primitive time machines, that could implant imaginary or real memories into your brain and make you experience the calm and silence of a library.

Anne-F had used the cards for a very basic information, for which she had used letter stamps. I am sure she found them somewhere, and judging from the way each character appeared on the paper, it needed a bit of manual work, to get the letters in the right order, so that they spell out the required information like ”LA REVOLUTION EST EN PLEURS” or ”DÉPLACEMENT RENDEZ-VOUS”. The cards also had the address on them, with the clear invitation:

TO RECEIVE A TAPE
SEND A GIFT OR
POSTCARD TO

CRUSTACÉS TAPES
4555 PONTIAC
MONTRÉAL, QC
CANADA H2J 2T2

I tried to find the same font, but couldn’t. I don’t have an experienced eye for this. The ‚O’ and the ‚5’ have a much nicer appearance, that makes you think a bit of a yellow toy-duck in a bathtub, where you would expect it the least. I mean like the pope’s papal tub, that, coming to speak of it, is made out of marble, carved, back in the days, by Michelangelo himself. Don’t be surprised to find a small radio-cassetteplayer within reach.

Another great feature was a ‚crustacés kit for infinite sound matter.’ These words were stamped on an ordinary white envelope. From the dust accumulated on the top fold, I gathered, it was an envelope that had been stored for a very long time. Probably Anne had found it at a ‚street sale’ and saved it from an anonymous form of recycling. The content of the white envelope was again a card, white with squares, the kind of pattern that those among you who were not good at mathematics don’t like too much. It showed a stamped pictogram of a tape.

On the backside, stamped again, and now I am getting curious, but something tells me not to ask her nothing, not about the kit she uses and not about the procedure to get these words in such a word-like fashion stamped on a piece of paper, well, as I was ready to tell, on the backside were five-step instructions on how to make a simple loop cassette. A piece of magnetic tape was part of the kit. If you want to receive a crustacés kit, just write to the above mentioned address.

You might also get one of the crustacés tapes.