The post office has long been a core part of almost every community in America, yet the future looks bleak for the United States Postal Service.

In a bid to dig itself out of a $10bn deficit, the USPS is considering cutting 120,000 jobs and shutting more than 3,500 post offices.

Evan Kalish, a 25-year-old graduate student, is trying to visit as many as possible before they disappear. So far he has collected post marks at more than 2,700 post offices across the US.

Crisscrossing the country, even going as far as Hawaii, Evan is chronicling on his blog the slow death of an institution originally founded in 1775. In this first person account, he explains why he began this odyssey.