Loving to detest the mailman!

The Reader is a strange mythical beast. According to the Bestiary, the Reader has the power to truly understand infiniteness. As a matter of fact, only the Reader is given the opportunity to peek inside an immeasurable amount of lives that are within the wide spectrum of characters contained in books.

As the Reader always welcomes new literary additions with visible joy, a stranger might think that nothing can negatively affect the Reader. Wrong.

Well, I love the mailman. Yet, I detest him. This (seemingly) psychopathic bipolar feeling is created by the never ending physical necessity that I have as a reader to catch a break. However, not only my mind refutes the idea of taking a break from reading, but the mailman doesn't stop his deliveries. 

In other words, as soon as I finish a book or a literary (pulp) magazine, a grinning federal employee on a white American General truck delivers more reading material right at my doorstep.

You Got Mail!

A regular human would be either thrilled or frustrated by this incessant delivery. The Reader can't accept setting on one simple feeling as he knows that the delivered book will contain another wonderful amount of different human and extra-human experiences. After all, that is the beauty of reading.

For example, I just finished reading Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine (review here) and yesterday I started King's Carrie - I read it a long time ago, in Italian - that I hope to finish in a couple of days. 

Guess what? Merciless as a Spartan, the man that wears the Eagle on his blue nylon windbreaker with pride, delivers not one, not two, but THREE literary magazines. The delivery of all this goodness means that I will not be able to read Carrie without thinking about the magazines and my reading queue. Then, I will eagerly read them and then I will start reading a new book (Salem's Lot; more on that in another post), just before something else will pop at my house.

I bet the mailman is now at home, laughing at me. He knows that he is subconsciously forcing me to read those three magazines and live the lives of the various characters. He cheers his power over my life and celebrates his feat while I am ruminating over when will I start to read Asimov's Science Fiction. Let it be known that choosing which one of the three magazines will be read first is as hard as selecting which turkey is to be pardoned on Thanksgiving.  

Oh boy, that's a Reader's life.

Thanks Mr. Mailman.