91.25

This is our mailbox:

This is our mailbox after a typical delivery of "mail":

The mail, when taken out of the mailbox and brought inside, is full of gems like these:

And these:

And funny stuff like this:

All of which make me want to do this.

My thought process:

a) I have no fucking clue who Gold Cat is and why I keep getting their mail. 

b) Is Gold Cat even a real name? Or is it a pseudonym? 

c) Who the fuck uses a pseudonym for their mail?

d) Who the fuck uses "Gold Cat" as a pseudonym? Why not something cool, like John S. Bladestaff? Or something corny like Ivana PoopNow? And those were just off the top of my head. Imagine if you had a few days. Just imagine what you could come up with.

e) I bet the mailman, if given a month, wouldn't come up with anything clever. His propensity for creativity [or lack thereof] is painfully clear because each day he brings the exact same shit and drops it into the exact same place. I would have a lot more respect for him if he hid the mail sometimes, or slipped in something that wasn't supposed to be there, like a live chicken, just to keep me on my toes and see if I'd say anything.

f) Would the mailman want to come home to a mailbox full of the same shit every day, especially if it was all addressed to people he'd never met or heard of?  Of course he wouldn't. 

g) Just how stingy does this fucking mailman think I am? Does he think I care about a dollar that much? 

h) News flash, asshole: I'm not going to comb through shitty magazine after shitty magazine and the odd newsletter to try and get 25 cents off my next purchase of iceberg lettuce because guess what? I don't buy iceberg lettuce. I don't buy any lettuce. Just like I don't buy new credit cards or leggings or all the other shit you perpetually bombard me with. Stop trying to guess what I want. If I need it, I'll buy it on amazon, or if I feel like supporting local business, I'll go to my neighborhood Target.  

So why, after close to six months of living here, does this still persist? Because every time I try and do something about it, my roommate Ryan undermines me. 

Attempt #1 - I took all the junk mail we received and threw it on the ground beneath our mailbox. I was diligent with this and the trash piled up quite nicely. The goal was to show the mailman just how much trash he was putting into our mailbox each week, and the implied message was that if he continued to do so, the environment would suffer as a result and he would be indirectly responsible for it all. If he stopped delivering junk, there wouldn't be any junk to litter. Unfortunately, Ryan didn't like coming home to a place where the front porch was covered with coupons and the paper-spam, so he would pick up the trash and throw it away. I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn't hear it. So the problem persisted.

Attempt #2 - Instead of throwing it on the ground, I decided to leave all the mail in the mailbox. Our box has a limited area, like all mailboxes do, and eventually I knew it would be impossible for our one-track minded mailman to fit any more junk in there. And so I waited for the event horizon. Not only would this accomplish what I was trying to do with my first attempt [show the mailman how much shit he delivered on a daily basis] but it would also inconvenience him; as each day passed, I knew it would be more challenging to stuff all the papers and magazines into an already crowded box. After a week, I could it was like playing on a high level of Tetris, where they give you shitty blocks and the blocks move fast and you don't really have time to stack them all that well. That's what it was like. To continue the Tetris metaphor just a bit further, I knew it would only be a matter of days before the mailman would "hit the pause button" and "quit the game." But yet again, Ryan cracked and took all of our piled up mail inside. His reason was that they would "stop delivering the mail" if our mailbox got too full. I protested, argued passionately that we should call the mailman's bluff and see if he had the balls to stop bringing our mail. And if in fact he did have the balls to do it, at least then we could respect our mailman even if we disagreed with the job he did. Again, my pleas fell on deaf ears. 

Attempt #3 - I wanted to write a passionately worded letter, arguing for a bit of common sense and judgement when delivering the mail. This was shot down by both Joe and Ryan, who said that that the mailman's not "legally" allowed to use his discretion as to which mail he does and does not deliver. I then made a rather clever and apt comparison to the guards at concentration camps, who were all just doing what was "legal" when they were sending millions of Jews to their graves. It was bit too intellectual for both of them, I could tell, and I didn't end up putting the letter out because I had a feeling that snake Ryan would take it down before the mailman could see it, thereby wasting my time, of which I already have precious little to waste. 

So where does this leave me? 

Stuck with a mailbox full of shit I don't care about or ever want to care about, but which I have to deal with all the same and throw away on a daily basis. 

The root of all this suppressed and poisonous anger? The amount of life that gets wasted collecting and throwing away this garbage. Let's be generous and say it only takes me fifteen seconds a day to collect the junk mail, open the door, walk inside, and put it in the trash [this is very generous, because not only does this cause the trash-can inside to pile up faster and therefore cause me to make more trips out to the driveway carrying trash-bags full of "once-in-a-lifetime offers", but also because I have to sort the mail, to make sure I don't throw out the one useful letter buried in a sea of shit]. So a generous fifteen seconds a day, right, (which is probably closer to thirty)? Well, that's a minute every four days. So in a year, I have to spend 91.25 minutes dealing with this shit. That's an action-movie. That's a half-marathon. It's a nice dinner with somebody you love. It's a nice dinner with somebody you say you love so they'll sleep with you. Or it's a nice dinner with somebody you don't love but just want to sleep with. Or it's a nice dinner with family, who you love but don't want to sleep with. Or it's a walk around town lake, or two forty-five minute sessions in a tanning bed. It could be anything, really. 

But sadly, for me, those 91.25 minutes are just wasted time, wasted life. 

On a brighter note, I was making a rare trip to Freebirds the other day and saw this on the car parked in front of me: 

I was so impressed I stopped and took a picture and seriously thought about waiting by the car so I could high-five the person who did this. It's a perfect middle-finger to parking attendants, forcing them to look at each little piece of paper to see if any of them are in fact valid. I'm sure there's a new bylaw soon to be passed [if there isn't one already], that will make "having more than one visible ticket on a windshield" illegal and ticket-able, but still, I stand and applaud you, whoever you are. It is the sign of true genius to be able to inconvenience those who make a life out of inconveniencing others. 

Fuck parking attendants and their lame-ass khaki shorts. Fuck cops who write jay-walking and speeding tickets "to keep us safe" when there are thousands of unsolved rapes and murders and therefore thousands of rapists and murderers roaming the streets. And fuck mailmen who "just do their job", much like the SS did. Keep your junk mail and your love handles and give me back my 91.25.