Infrequent Nights

May the junk mail of Taiwan be damned by all that is holy! It is absolutely out of control. Our mailbox is constantly stuffed with this crap. I have severe doubts of the efficacy of direct mailing when there is such a high volume. One would need to give up hours of time every week to read all ths crap. Thus, my suspicion is, in most households it goes directly into the trash, or rather into the recycling. Because with Taipei's, none too cheap, mandatory garbage bags throwing one's junk mail into the trash is prohibitively expensive. You'd reckon that on a tiny island plagued with waste disposal problems (so much so that they used to ship it to the Solomon islands, heaps of room there y'know...) there would be a law against what equates to walking around town and leaving garbage at every single household one passes.

I have nothing personally against the individuals who distribute the junk mail. I have caught them red-handed on a number of occasions cramming useless crap into my mailbox. I hesitate to ask them not to though, as I realize they are just trying to put food on the table, and likely get paid by the piece. That said the sight of endless flyers poking out of my mailbox every time I come home gets my hackles up. And I don't even know how my hackles work, so this is obviously an instictive reaction of some sort. Most likely my junk mail induced anger is an evolutionary artifact originally intended to defend my ancestors from that god-damned monkey who would always come by with sample banana skins from the bananas his tree was producing. Back in the day my ancestors could just beat the crap out of the junk mail monkey until he learned not to come around anymore. These days that sort of behaviour is frowned upon and I await the enactment of a law of some sort to keep the monkeys off my back.