The Difficulty of Not Wanting

In this age of supersize-me portions, it is almost inconceivable that someone really might not want something - and I don't mean the hermit's "not anything at all, thank you", but just some things yes, and some others not, or even most not. Keep life simple. Yes, not everyone wants to pig out whenever there's an opportunity for it, and there increasingly are.

With the deplorable effects of binge drinking and you name it. - I don't want to put my foot in it, and therefore leave the extrapolations to you. There's plenty to choose from in the press. I gather I'm safe when I carefully name binge drinking that is loathed by a sound majority.

(Microsoft Media)

This not-wanting is already evident in "No Junk Mail" signs on letterboxes, with or without a "thank you" underneath. We now come to the necessity to define "junk". According to most real-estate agents, their flyers are not junk because the "No Junk Mail" sign on the letterbox doesn't apply to them, or so they think, until they get a nasty letter - equally unsolicited - from an annoyed letterbox owner who explicitly didn't want a flyer or fridge magnet or business card or you name it.

After that they become speechless, at least for a while, until they forget all about the letter from the letterbox owner and the whole business starts all over again, and again. So what is junk anyway? And I don't mean "a Chinese flatbottom ship with a high poop and battened sails", which is a definition taken from Yahoo! Dictionary and refers to a word with a completely different etymology, eventually going back to "Old Javanese jong, a sea-going ship", they say.

No, this would allow the real-estate agent to safely pronounce, see, mate, that really doesn't have anything to do with us. We deliver our material on foot or by bike. Well, they couldn't use "jongs", "djungs" or "djongs" on the roads anyway, could they. Tough luck, Mr. Agent, there's another "junk" and the Dictionary has this, too.

Apart from all the other definitions such as discarded material, worn-out articles and shoddy material, and some meanings we don't need in this context anyway, there's "something meaningless" and that's just the point. Those real-estate agents would vehemently protest if someone called their flyers meaningless stuff. And, admittedly, in a way, they do carry meaning, don't they. But it has become generally accepted by now, and some other dictionaries might list this, too, that things you didn't ask for, you didn't order, that aren't explicitly addressed to you, are defined as junk.

And at least as far as the postie is concerned, whether he drives across the lawn or not, he sticks with the "no junk" sign, since posties, too, these days, carry with them a certain amount of advertising material. But since this isn't explicitly addressed to letterbox owners, they are not allowed to put it in along with regular, i.e. addressed mail, or on their own.

And then there's the local paper. Oh, the local paper; and we've even got two of them in our area, one distributed on Tuesdays and the other one on Fridays. And since they are also available at both the local library and the local shopping centre, that themselves are not too far away from each other and that people around here can comfortably reach on foot or, if they prefer to do their shopping on the way home from work, they drop by on wheels, dropping their cars on the centre's carpark. One may be forgiven for wondering why deliver the local papers at all to letterboxes so close to shopping centres.

(as seen by the author)

But deliver they do, either on foot or by motorbike and whether you want it or not. And I should say up front, the paper deliveryman's motorbike is a lot more annoying than the postie's. Whereas the postie's bike sounds like a wasp - hence the name for the Italian Vespa - the paperman's sounds like an irate hornet. But irrespective of the sound, bikes roaring one way or another, or shuffling shoes - that I can't hear these ones, what did you expect me to do on a daily basis, wait for them behind the bushes and then go "Ahaaaaaa, it's you again!"? - they don't respond to the "No Junk Mail" sign.

For one, a paper isn't mail. Is a flyer? I'm beginning to wonder if it is. And it most certainly isn't junk. Well, here I do emphatically agree, even though I don't find the time to read each and every weekly copy, and some subject matters may clearly lie outside my sphere of interest, I do appreciate local information, otherwise I'd be knowledgeable when it comes to the latest developments in the Euro zone but left with no clue about what's going on around where I live.

The localisation of the local radio station is a different matter - there's a lot of "local" amongst these lines, but they are all different. The local radio station provides you with feedback on the larger metropolitan area. The localisation of the local papers is much closer to your letterbox.

But I still prefer the local paper's copy taken from a rack at the library or the shopping centre. At least in that case, it doesn't have wrinkles all over and opens more easily and neatly, and it also doesn't clog the letterbox, at times crunching the letters the box is meant to be there for.

I've tried a "No Local Newspaper Thank You" sticker provided by the local paper distribution centre which means they understand the problem and I'm not the only one opposed to clutter in and around the letterbox. That's good to know.

But some delivery people are blissfully oblivious to the sign.