mail ghosts.

My roommates and I receive a fantastic amount of junk mail. For every piece of legit mail we get, there are also 10 pieces of crap mail. We can't get rid of the stuff fast enough; there are boxes of it piled in our living room. The couple who lived in our apartment before us, Dennis and Olga, must have bought all their stuff through catalogs, and let me tell you, they had some weird taste. Need hunting supplies? Books from the University of Pittsburgh Press? A vast array of scented candles? I have probably have a magazine for you!

According to this article, mailpeople are even more sick of junk mail than I am. I really don't understand why, though; how is delivering a Scented Living catalog to my apartment any worse than delivering a copy of The New Yorker? I hate junk mail because it's boring and I have to dispose of it, but mailpeople are hoarding this crap! Perhaps it's not junk mail in particular that's the problem, but the never ending stream of mail itself. A truly Sisyphean task, if ever there was one.

Sometimes legit mail comes for Dennis and Olga too -- large envelopes marked "URGENT" and "CONFIDENTIAL." We never know what to do with this stuff, because we have no idea what happened to Dennis and Olga, and our landlords don't know either. Personally, I think they're dead. Either that, or they're in rehab trying to kick their addition to mail-order shopping. My artsy roommates briefly considered making some kind of installation piece out of all the junk mail we get, but I thought that would be super creepy, and I'm glad they didn't. After all, what if Olga and Dennis really are dead? Having their mail all over my walls would be like one huge creepy consumer séance. Not good for the karmic balance.

I have a history with junk mail for dead people, too. Karen Carpenter, lead singer of The Carpenters, who was sadly famous for dying of anorexia, used to live in the house I grew up in, in Park Slope. We used to get mail for her all the time, and I always thought it was super creepy. Or at least that's what my Mom told me. Now that I think about it, though, Karen Carpenter is probably a very common name, and the house I grew up in really isn't somewhere a moderately famous person would live. Oh my God, did my Mom make that up!? Mean!