17 September—Morris residents should bow down and kiss the fetid feet of the United States Postal Service because after closing down the town’s post office last year the USPS in its infinite generosity next month is going to install a mailbox in the town hall parking lot. Of course, Morris’s new compact one-way postal facility is only for depositing stamped outgoing mail (with many restrictions, mind you) which likely will be collected only once a day, if that.

For any other business—like you name it—Morris postal customers will still have to travel out of town, with the Thomaston post office being the USPS’s suggested stand-in, as it’s been for Northfield customers since the USPS killed the village’s friendly little facility in the Northfield General Store many years ago.

It’s hard to believe that it took the intercession of U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy and U.S. Representative Jahana Hayes to get the USPS to agree, however reluctantly, to be sure, to allow a so-called “blue box”—a goddamn mailbox like we used to find just about everywhere without looking—to be installed in Morris.

You may not know that the post office which had been at 8 West Street in the town center, such as it may be, for decades closed on 31 August 2025 because the lease expired and the USPS wanted to renew it with landlord Steve Cook at a reduced rent. Of course, that was unreasonable and unacceptable. Given the USPS, however, it’s no surprise.

While the United States Postal Service claims—but neither insists nor promises—the closure of the Morris post office is only temporary, there’s good—make that excellent—reason to believe otherwise. For one, is the USPS really, seriously looking for a new location in Morris? And it is the USPS, after all, an agency of the executive branch of the U.S. government; and not only should we not trust or believe the U.S. government, but by now we should have learned never to trust or believe the blatantly mendacious executive branch as currently constituted . . .