DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I didn’t make it to the mailbox yesterday, so today there was a double load of catalog crap squeezed from the ass of retail America: over 4 lbs total. That is not a typo — I had four pounds of catalogs in my mailbox. Lands End Kids, MacConnection, Art Institute of Chicago, Sundance (faux-rugged clothing for SUV drivers), Macy’s, Duncraft “Living with Nature” (gourmet birdseed?!), J. Jill (leisure clothing for old people), The Sharper Image (what kind of pocket translator defines you as a person?), Smith and Noble, Smith & Hawken, you’d like me to list Smith & Wesson but it’s probably not legal to advertise guns via direct mail — be very glad — Brookstone Hard-to-Find Tools (really, how hard can it be anymore? Brookstone has been selling the same stuff for 10 years.), Hold Everything, Chamber(pot)s by Williams Sonoma, L.L.Bean Winter Clothing, Dance Distributors. What a waste. Someday soon we’ll be mining landfills for fuel, and the enormous piles of discarded advertising will strike shame into our souls. How did this world go so wrong?

On that topic, I had a visitor to the house today. I was poring over Artisan Baking, scaling a bread recipe for party this weekend, with music cranked up in the background. Well, foreground. Maybe even surround-ground. The walls were shaking, and it wasn’t just because I was mirroring the double-bass line on the kitchen floor.

The doorbell rang. This is unusual. I’m too far out to get any solicitors, and most of the folks I want to find me can’t, like the time Airborne Express took three days to deliver an “overnight” package. There was a coincidental lull in the music, one of those sensitive vocals-and-keyboards passages that metal bands put in to maximize the aural contrast at the next 200 mph chorus, with multiple layers of fingerboard guitar solos and four-limbed drum fills playing in unison at inhuman speeds. (This is Elegy’s Forbidden Fruit album, the closest thing to speed-metal that I own.)

Anyway, I opened the door to see a heavyset but kind-looking woman clutching a stack of propaganda. “Religious pilgrim” was my immediate conclusion. I couldn’t see the Watchtower magazine, but I sensed it. Or maybe I caught a whiff of incense and desperation on the breeze. She leapt right into her pitch, with a line like “How did this world go so wrong?” For a second I thought I’d made a bad call, maybe she was here from the post office or the DMA, but junkmail is my irrational obsession, not hers.

I smiled, tuning out the spiel while I waited for a pause so I could deliver my “get the heck off my porch” message, tarted up to match her gingham of course. While I waited, I realized that the quiet part of the Elegy song was about to end. Remember, the stereo was still cranked up just behind me in the living room.

The “intro to damnation” speech was winding its way down, too. I listened to the speech, and the music, and the speech, and the music, back and forth in slow motion as they converged. The woman had closed with a question, and it was a total Dale Carnegie question I had to answer “yes” to, assuming I really was reading a cookbook and not, I don’t know, rinsing sacrificial calf blood off my Sawzall when she rang the doorbell, and in that pause when I was juggling a reply around in my head, Elegy’s rhythm section (i.e. the entire band) kicked in at full throttle, and a wall of high-volume heavy metal annihilation blasted across the room and smacked the woman in the face, which took on a sort of resigned “I’m in the wrong place, aren’t I” look, and my smile got a little bit bigger and a lot more genuine, as if to say, Yes, I’m the person your pastor warned you about.

After she left, I queued up I Am Woman: The Essential Helen Reddy Collection, just to spite her.