So one of my media mail boxes, full of books, died on the way out to me. It was shipped in a plastic bin, with one side missing. A number of the books are undoubtedly gone–the box was jammed full, and now it isn’t.

And I’m pretty okay with that. I don’t know what I lost, and I won’t until I miss it and go looking, which probably won’t be until I get my own apartment again. (I do think most of my Anne Bishop has wandered off.) Oh, well. Amazon heals all wounds.

The WEIRD thing is that I’ve acquired a hitchhiker book.  Wedged in between Sandman and the True Game was…”The Marquise of O–” and other stories, by Heinrich von Kleist. Not a book I’ve ever owned, or thought about owning, or knew existed. I pulled it out and said “What the hell…?”

I see the scene now. The post office is jammed. Paper flutters down. Workers wheel dollies packed with media mail, careening through the aisles, and suddenly WHAM! Collision! Chaos! Apocalypse! Two boxes are down, bleeding books across the concrete. Oh, no! What goes where? No time to worry! This is the post office, damnit! The show much go on, the mail must go through. What’s left of it, anyhow. Books are hastily shovelled into bins, slapped with labels, sent on their way.  A few forlorn volumes are kicked under bins, to lie lonely until somebody fishes one out and reads it on their lunchbreak.

And somewhere, a student of German Enlightenment literature is picking through his box of Goethe, muttering about the low standards of the postal service–if there is a god with an aesthetic sense running the universe, he is hopefully wearing black and smoking a clove cigarette–and he reaches a hand into the box, up to the elbow, like a vet inside a cow’s rear end, and fishes out a dog-eared copy of Daughter of the Blood.

“What the hell….?”

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