DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Christmas shopping season has already begun. I believe the traditional start is one day after Thanksgiving, because Americans only have the mental capacity to plan one holiday at a time, and if Chrismas shopping really began this early, kids could end up with miniature roasted turkeys in their stockings, and little pools of potatoes and gravy coagulating beneath where they’ve leaked out through the toe.

Nonetheless, the catalog onslaught has begun. I fear my mailbox. Inside, every day, two or three glossy full-color catalogs appear, hawking everything from egg coddlers to synthetic-fiber briefs.

The worst of it is, the catalogs I’m drowning in aren’t even mine. Years of guarding my address have paid off — I get very little junk mail. The current deluge is for the people who just moved out of this house. Now I know why they moved away from this amazing place… they’d bought so much crap via mail-order that they ran out of space to store it all. Or maybe they’d spent so much on shipping that they couldn’t make their mortgage payments.

They received nearly every specialty-clothing catalog I’ve ever seen (J Crew, LL Bean, Patagonia), and some obscure titles that probably appeal to a smaller audience (mysportbra.com?!). They had more travel-goods and gadget catalogs than SkyMall (Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone, Herrington, Magellan’s, Travelsmith). And they had the oddball base covered too, especially the countrified kitsch variety (American Girl, Hearth and Plow). The shocking thing is that each one of these catalogs had a customer ID on the back, indicating that the vendors hadn’t simply rented the name and address — the people who used to live here had actually bought stuff from every one of these companies.

Wait, did I forget housewares? (Williams Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Hold Everything, Macy’s). They sure haven’t forgotten me. Macy’s puts junk in my mailbox three days/week.

One of the ironies of my life is that I always loved to receive mail. All manner of exciting things could show up. But as I’ve gotten older, this simple pleasure has been stripped away by a world full of shysters. Nowadays, most of the mail I receive makes me angry or depressed: bills, political pitches, the inevitable catalogs, mail-grams from unknown mortgage brokers that quote the details of my mortgage in a terribly misguided effort to convince me that I should trust them with my money. (Perhaps that’s a rant for another time, but excuse me, why is the amount of my loan considered public knowledge?)

At my old house, it would occasionally happen that we’d get no mail. At the time, those days made me a little sad, as if I’d missed out on something. Now, I look forward to the quiet. So does the guy who hauls away my recycling.