Hatred, Compulsion, and Insanity

Behold the quaint wicker basket. Whenever I look at it I am consumed with the icy purgatorial fires of hatred. Some previous occupant of my house nailed it up so that the US Postal Service can stop by every day and drop off 759 mail-order catalogs.

Every day I dump the entire contents of this mail basket (consistently depressing results have caused me to give up even looking through it) directly into one of the paper grocery bags I am forced to accumulate specifically for this purpose. The paper bag sits on the floor of my kitchen, where it attracts dog hair. There is room for only one paper bag of mail-order catalogs at a time in my cubicle-sized kitchen, so when the bag fills up, I remove it to my front porch, where it attracts venomous spiders. Then I start another bag. I must remember, on Monday nights, to drag my impressive collection of paper bags full of dog hair and spiders and mail-order catalogs--they are imposingly heavy-- to the curb, lest I miss the recycling truck on Tuesday morning. If I'm not on my A-game, recycling-truck-wise, my front porch will fill up in no time flat with paper bags full of mail-order catalogs.

One time I missed the recycling truck two weeks in a row. My front porch swiftly became a swollen chaos of paper (see photo below). I had to call in a disaster recovery team. They found the rotting corpse of a neighbor boy under all the bags. I pretended to feel sad about this, but it turned out to be the same kid who once chucked unshelled pecans at my new car, so inwardly I danced a little jig.

I realize there's no way to keep the catalog companies from inundating me with paper that I immediately throw away. Whether their behavior stems from a murderous hatred of trees or from a compulsion to spread far and wide low-quality images of cheap crap from China, I know not, but there can be little doubt that it is a kind of insanity.

And believe me, ordinarily I am the last person to be unsympathetic toward uncontrollable hatred or compulsions or insanity. Ask anyone down at Spinster Aunt HQ, and they'll tell you that Twisty Faster is equanimity itself. A model of forbearance, you might say. Yet there are limits.

I am beginning to lose patience with this catalogial inundation.

An identical effect, from both the forests' and the catalog companies' perspective, would obtain if they simply cut down the trees and shipped them directly to the landfill, leaving me the fuck out of it. I have, in fact, suggested this cunning scheme to several of the mail-order catalog companies. In response they sent more catalogs.

I then attempted to persuade my letter-carrier to deposit my mail directly into the wheeled garbage receptacle I put out on the porch. "Mail box, garbage can--what's the diff?" I said reasonably. But apparently there is a diff, albeit one visible only to the trained eye of a dour civil servant. She was all, "no way, Jose."

All I'm sayin is, it is seriously NUTS that I am expected to maintain disposal facilities for the convenience of tree-hating capitalist entities that exist exclusively for the purpose of sending me bags of garbage.

Comments

[AndiF]

As a little sidenote to a consulting job I was doing for mega-publisher RR Donnelly, I got a tour of their catalog process. Among the very unhappy things I learned was that in order to have sufficient numbers for bulk mailing to a specific zipcode, they borrowed addresses from their vast database to pad things out, thus solving the mystery of why I sometimes get strange catalogs* or two or three copies of the same catalog.

* OTOH, this does mean that every now and again, we get to play that very fun game "what's the most idiotic item in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog?"

[Mistress]

Watch Penn & Teller's RECYCLING episode of Bullshit. It's on season 2. They say it better, but it costs more & is worse for the environment to recycle paper & plastic. And there are more trees now than there ever were before because the paper companies grow them to make paper. So, yeah.

It still sucks to get bags full of garbage in the mail, though.

[Chris Clarke]

They say it better, but it costs more & is worse for the environment to recycle paper & plastic. And there are more trees now than there ever were before because the paper companies grow them to make paper. So, yeah.

Penn and Teller are the kind of skeptics that uncritically swallow corporate bullshit when it matches their rich-guy libertarian ideologies.

There are not "more trees now than there ever were before" in most of the places where there were ever trees. Period. That's Limbaughese crap.

[Twisty]

Penn & Teller creep me out.

Even if they didn't creep me out, it is my policy never to take environmental advice from guys who live in Vegas, one of the most environmentally hostile (and stupidest) cities on the planet.

[Finn]

>Penn & Teller creep me out.<

I take it you didn't like The Aristocrats?

[CafeSiren]

BEsides magazines, I am also powerless to stop the floods of advertising circulars from local merchants. Mostly grocery stores, but, since I live in Southern California, I occasionally get glossy 5x7 cards offering to burn my face with acid or inject paralytic toxins into the area around my eyes. I, of course, am expected to pay for the privilege.

I can't just throw them in the recycling without looking, because occasionally something like a power bill is hidden between the grocery ads and the offers to steam-clean my non-existent carpet, but I often wonder if anyone actually sits down and reads the Albertson's ad from front to back. And how this can possibly make financial sense to the companies doing it.

[norbizness]

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tried to return the catalogs to the Pottery Barn store? Yeah, I thought it was ruined by the horsefaced, unfunny, eponymous jerkoff as well. God I hate Jerry Seinfeld.

[Sophie]

Is there a postage-paid return envelope with the catalog ?
We usually have these, so I sometimes stuff as much as I can in the enveloppe, and send it back to the annoying company at their expense. They stop sending me things.

As for unaddressed catalogs, we have stickers (from the equivalent of EPA) on the letterboxes that tell the postperson we don't want them, and it works.

I would get crazy if I had all this in my mailbox.

[Finn]

>As for unaddressed catalogs, we have stickers (from the equivalent of EPA) on the letterboxes that tell the postperson we don't want them, and it works.<

How did you get those? Care to share?

I'd put it on my mailbox if I knew how to do it.

[miz_geek]

If I admit that I actually don't receive much in the way of catalogs, will the catalog gods hear it (or read it) and suddenly dispense piles and piles of them into my mailbox?

Maybe I shouldn't chance it.

[Laura Shapiro]

I've been lurking on your blog for a while, Twisty, but I finally have a good reason to comment (apart from the ever-popular reason of telling you that you rock, and your brain is huge and thinky, and you have mad photography skillz).

I loathe junk mail, and I finally did something about it a couple of years ago. You can easily opt out of 90% of junk mail by sending letters to the three top credit bureaus, preventing them from sharing your personal information with anybody. With another letter, you can get yourself off most direct mail lists for five years.

You will, unfortunately, still receive catalogs from anyone you've bought things from, but you should stop getting unsolicited catalogs, credit card offers, and the like. If you really don't want to keep getting the Pottery Barn catalog just because you bought that lamp one time, you can contact them directly.

I did this two years ago and it's still going strong. I get a fraction of the junk mail I used to get, and I'm happy to think of all the trees that are still standing as a result.

[deja pseu]

I often wonder if anyone actually sits down and reads the Albertson's ad from front to back

My ex-MIL used to do this, and then make up her shopping lists based on what was "on special." I have to hand it to her, that woman could get six cents out of every nickel.

[Stephanie]

Much as I despise junk mail, I was amused when a friend with a wood-burning stove told me that she and her husband had bought a little gadget that rolls anything paper-newspaper, catalogues, etc., into tight little logs. They heated their house for most of a winter on the junk mail they had saved up over the year, and when they got a little low, she sent a dollar to the Christian Coalition or something similarly vile. That did the trick for the rest of the cold season. I wouldn't recommend it, because that stuff does not burn cleanly, but it was funny.

[Rana]

This might be helpful, as will calling the catalogs. It won't get rid of local circulars though, unfortunately.

[TimT]

I don't see why where Pen and Teller come from should invalidate what they are saying. Recycling is a complicated process, and it has to take up a certain amount of space, time, and energy. So it's certainly worthwhile asking how bad for the environment recycling can be.

P.J. O'Rourke trashed the 'recycling' concept pretty convincingly in Eat the Rich. Maybe recycling technology has moved on from then. Maybe not. Certainly, most of the people I run into don't know one way or the other - but they just sort of assume that recycling is good and proper.

[Sophie]

Re : Stickers on letter boxes

Sorry I didn't share because I thought it was irrelevant : this is, I'm sorry to have to mention it, a French thing, originating from the French equivalent of EPA and Energy Management Agency.
http://www.ademe.fr/stoppub/default.htm

They have worked with the bigger catalog dispatchers to ensure this will work.

[Alpaca Rider]

As for "More trees", I'm looking out my window at a city called Columbus. It used to be all trees. Now it's a city. My question is, where is the Columbus-sized paper tree farm and, if it exists, why would anyone think it did shit for the environment since it'd have to be comprised of fast-growing softwoods that get cut down biannually and never serve as a habitat for animals nor as a carbon sink for C02? But I'm still skeptical that a Columbus-sized tree farm exists, much less that plus a Roanoak-sized tree farm AND a Williamsburg-sized tree farm AND a Richmond-sized tree farm AND a Pittsburgh-sized tree farm AND...

Oh, and:
/We usually have these, so I sometimes stuff as much as I can in the enveloppe, and send it back to the annoying company at their expense. They stop sending me things./

HALOGEN LIGHT BULBS.
Individually, halogen light bulbs are fine to have. But if enough people use those return envelopes to mail halogen light bulbs to a single place, well... in larger quantities, halogen light bulbs become HAZMAT.

Yay hazmat.

[Sophie]

About the big forest just hidden somewhere and growing, have a look at what the satellites see in Canada.
It seems worms are eating the big growing forest :
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/07/google_maps_/index.php

[Sylvanite]

Yeah, recycling is all about the energy costs involved in doing the recycling. Trees are renewable resources, the petroleum used to fuel the recycling effort is not. The primary reason to recycle paper is to keep it out of landfills. Roughly 50% of what goes into landfills is paper. Consequently, landfills fill up faster, then I have to go through a new application for a landfill expansion from Waste Management, Inc. I currently have an application for a brand-new landfill occupying a large portion of the floor of my cubicle.

As to the number of trees, well, please remember that the entire eastern portion of the U.S. was mostly denuded of trees after the Europeans came; all those trees you see travelling across Pennsylvania are replacements for all the trees that had been cut down.

The best thing to recycle is aluminum. Aluminum is very energy-intensive to process from its ore - so much so that the ore is shipped from the tropics to the Pacific Northwest to take advantage of cheap hydroelectric power. It only takes 50% of the original processing energy to recycle aluminum.

[Twisty]

Look, I don't know from recycling. I'm just sayin', quit cutting down the fucking trees for no reason.

[Sylvanite]

Well, yes, obviously it is VERY irritating to get tons of stupid, pointless catalogs. That is indeed a waste of perfectly good trees, which have done us no harm and don't deserve such an ignominious fate. Not to mention all the clay that is wasted on making the pages glossy that could have been used to make something useful, like dinner plates and coffee mugs! :)

[Ron Sullivan]

Sylvanite, your point might be stronger than you think. There's plenty of petroleum involved in logging and milling and pulping and otherwise processing and transporting those trees -- which don't grow in a vacuum. And a tree farm is not a forest any more than a lawn is a meadow.

But you knew that.

[Sylvanite]

Yes, there are tremendous energy costs associated with processing trees for paper. It's also very polluting, and consumes enormous amounts of water. Also, a tree farm is not natural, just as lawns or other cultivated lands are not. Twisty is justified in being irritated at the waste involved in making tons (literally!) of unwanted, unsolicited catalogs.

Frankly, I've heard hemp would be a better source of paper. However, I'm not very knowledgable about paper-making with non-tree fiber sources, though I have seen cotton rag paper being made. :)

[Ledasmom]

Whenever I visit my mother in the state of Washington and we are driving along to our usual godforsaken camping spot (the big event on the way in is stopping at the last pit toilet), I always have to look twice at the sign for the, no kidding, Chief Joseph Tree Farm. Which is not a good idea, because it's up on what looks to me, a person from the eroded-mountain part of the country, like a highish piece of land.

[ae]

Sylvanite, you beat me to it. It takes 75 chemicals to process pulp into paper. Hemp requires none of that. It's renewable, non-toxic, blah-di-blah, and I was all for it until I learned about kenaf!

The arguments against recycling, such as they are, tend still to benefit industries that have no (economic) interest in sustainability (or accountability), so screw 'em and Penn and Teller, too. Every little bit less in the landfills and in the water table helps, and until the corps get religion on this matter, I say recycle. (One could agitate for more efficient recycling processes in the meantime, of course.)

Twisty, this is one of my fave things you've written. There cannot possibly be more paper in our house, and I swear to dog we're going to end up like this guy even after protracted battles against the Paper Industrial Complex.

One note: beware of warranty cards and charitable contributions as major culprits in the rampant name-exchange. Oh, and be sure to tell J. Crew to stop supporting their entire enterprise on your back, for the love of all that is holy and just! Maybe that last one is just me. =)