I Got My Mind on My Mail and My Mail on My Mind

Rollin' across the floor mat, smokin' the bottom of my pantslegs with my space heater, sippin' on 44 oz Diet Coke and Great Value Cherry Limeade Sugar Free Drink Mix...

I got my mind on my mail and my mail on my mind.

On the way to town this afternoon, I saw that some ne'er-do-well had bashed a mailbox again. He didn't get all the mailboxes. They have mostly been ne'er-do-wellproofed. Especially by the guy who had a lovely brick arched enclosure that was destroyed within three months of erection (heh, heh, you know what I said!), who then replaced the top of that structure with a giant flat rock nearly the same color as the bricks. None of that stone is going anywhere now. I think it would withstand a nuclear wind. Aluminum baseball bats be darned.

No need to worry about EmBee. She is solid. Her half-inch thick steel pipe walls are further encased in a cubby in that wooden mailbox apartment that is mounted on steel pipe and cemented two feet into the soil. She, too is not going anywhere.

I am letting the record show that I have a most scathingly brilliant idea for those who cannot build their mailboxes of steel and stone. For those who have to rely on the flimsy Walmart mailcatchers, and don't have enough people living in their compound to make a mailbox condo out of 2 x 12s. It will be a metal case, not too thick, not too heavy, that will wrap around the mailbox. Like netting around a bag of onions. It will contain sensors that will trigger a container mounted under the mailbox THAT SHOOTS DYE! Yes! Like a frightened squid, your mailbox can jet colored ink at its attackers! TAKE THAT, YOU NE'ER-DO-WELLS! Nothing to blind them or cause their skin to putrefy. Just something that won't wash off. Something that marks them, to borrow a partial quote from Mattie Ross, of near Dardanelle in Yell County, like banished Cain. And their car, too! I will begin selling it on the counter of my proposed handbasket factory, and branch into mail order. Won't that be ironic? Selling a gadget to protect your mail by mail order?

As I got a little farther on down the road, I saw my own mailman. Not the hateful one who argued with Genius. This was the weekend mailman. He drives a Jeep. A vehicle not really suited for mail delivery, no matter how many Makes Frequent Stops and U.S. Mail magnets you slap on the side and back. So now I know who to complain about the next time I set foot in and belly up to the counter of the dead-mouse-smelling post office. Because when I came back and pulled over to stop on the right side of the road near Mailbox Row, I saw this:

EMBEE WAS GAGGED!

That's right. She could not have closed her mouth if she tried. No way could she have even brought her metal lip near the magnetic roof of her mouth. Papers jutted out her jaw. She was like a fish out of water, gasping for breath, her mouth agape. I pulled the gag out. It was composed of two 9 x 12 stuffed envelopes of college recruiting propaganda for The Pony, and one Entertainment Weekly magazine for me. They were not stacked flat upon each other and then curved into a roll to conform to EmBee's tubelike pipe physique. No. There were jammed in one at a time, all willy-nilly, the corner of one ripping multiple holes in the other. AND, in behind them, in the bowels of EmBee, were the enveloped mail pieces. Jammed in, I tell you, scrinched and crunched, flattened against EmBee's rear like those marching band members misdirected by The Stork in Animal House up against that wall at the end of the alley.

Can not one person in this handbasket-hungry world do their job with proficiency?