I often wondered...

Why postal workers in the USA are fond of the occasional gun wielding rampage.

Until, that is, I began to give serious consideration to the life of a postal worker. I came to the conclusion that the reason must be that the average postal worker works strange hours and as such is removed from society in general and is shunted off to the fringes...

The Wee Small Hours is a dark and dangerous place to exist; Sunlight becomes a rarely seen thing, interpersonal relationships are restricted to milkmen, gothic types, homeless people, drunks making their way home after a night on the sauce and surly co-workers who also inhabit the part of the day that, over time, slowly rots away your spirit.

Not many people can live on the boundaries and still keep what little sanity they had to begin with. Fortunately I am one of those people. I can sleep all day only to emerge from my internal cocoon when the sun sets and darkness takes over.

I skid and slide on the edges of dusk like a speed-skater who has honed his craft from an early age. Graduating from uneven pond surfaces to billiard table smooth Olympic standard ice rinks that are tended by the finest Zamboni controller can make, or break, a man.

Some postal workers can handle fringe work with a grace and elan rarely seen. Others, however, cannot and lose their minds. They begin to take to the ruinator that is strong drink... Beginning firstly with beer and degenerating, over time, to rum or perhaps even whisky... But due to the off kilter hours they work they are forced to drink at unsocial hours.

They finish in the early hours of the morning and filter out of work to make their way towards dank drinking holes that are populated by the dregs of society. They become acquainted with their fellow night owls... The type of people who fight, fuck and feel dirty, soiled, used and abused. Those people.

Because of this the postal worker is sucked into the tarpit of self hatred. Paranoia abounds and the sotto voce of the internal demon takes over and begins to guide the postal worker onto the hellbound path. Then, one day, they awake and find that they are now one of the dregs. They wander home in the early hours stinking of drink and staggering. They mumble loathful epithets at unknown strangers because the sotto voce demands it.

The final step is taken when the sotto voce begins to whisper how good it would be to rid the world of some of the lesser humans... A gun is sought... A vengeance wreaked... And people are killed...

To finish, I offer you this advice. Should you ever find yourself offered a job delivering the mail I would advise that you steer clear. It's not good for your mental health.