Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers…
Oh junk mail, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Better yet, let’s count the number of dead bodies it takes to get us this week’s supermarket coupon flyer for out-of-stock groceries. Ground beef for three bucks a pound… fake news at that or any price since the neighbor panic-bought a six-month supply and stuffed all eighty pounds in his freezer.
Unless we’re counting the corpses of trees crashing to the forest floor, the first casualties in this boondoggle are all the poor bastards working for direct mail companies who stuff this crap into envelopes.
Then we have the poor postal service employees who sort it all.
After touching who knows how many germ-infested hands, it makes its way to the mail carriers who deliver it.
Finally, there’s you and me, the saddest links in this chain of filth and disease. That damn walk to the mailbox is the most activity we get in a day so we look forward to it, but we really shouldn’t.
Our quest to peruse this week’s missing persons flyer for a glimpse of some faces other than those trapped with us in this hell we call home by another four letters may have started innocently enough. It ends, however, in a macabre infectious disease tale that can be traced right back to its patient zero origin at the mailing house.
Dragging these parcels in all slathered in virus, we unsuspectingly contaminate ourselves and everyone else quarantined herein. Netflix and chill like we were supposed to do morphs quickly into Netflix and choke.
As much as I look forward to receiving coupons to pizza shops I can’t visit and discounts on tires I can’t purchase and offers from chimney sweeps forbidden from sweeping and free assessments from chiropractors who aren’t chiropracting, I’ll find a way to do without them for now. Trust me, I’m good.
The CDC may not be confirming this Trail of Tears but they’re not denying it either, and that’s good enough to fan the fires of my corona paranoia. At long last, my eyes are wide open.
Giving up those glorious pictures of gutter guards will be hard; realizing my affair partner is probably sleeping with her husband again was surely harder. I can do this, and I hope you’re with me!
If you’re not, let’s at least revise the postal service motto. No longer are these proud civil servants persevering to provide an essential service. They’re telemarketers in another form, catering to the gluttony of corporate America that drives our own incessant consumerism.
They may as well be standing on a sweltering street corner dressed in a Statue of Liberty suit while holding a tax preparation sign. From this moment forward, their misplaced sense of duty shall be recognized for what it is.
“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor global pandemic stays these couriers from the swift delivery of some piles of fucking junk that feed the insatiable capitalist consumption machine.”
Chuck Miller writes stuff on platforms for people with dubious credentials. Visit https://www.whatthechuuuck.com/ for more of his nonsense and one thing that makes a lot of sense: his children’s picture book about a little girl striving to overcome developmental delays, Will Little Roo Ever…?.