Postal windfall

world's endFrom a friend, who lives in a town in Tennessee and sends me links I often comment on here and who acts as voluntary (Tennessee is the volunteer state) copy-editor for this blog.

Walt: Got a package in the mail containing a letter from the Post Office. “The enclosed material was discovered loose in the mail and has apparently become separated from its packaging. If you feel the entire contents has not been recovered…  Please accept my sincere apologies… The loss of or damage to any piece of mail is as disappointing to us as it is to our customers…  Signed, Supervisor, Undeliverable Mails.” In the package, a hardcover book: “World’s End” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. If it was “loose in the mail…separated from its packaging”, how did they figure out it was meant for me?  Anyway I didn’t order it, so how did they figure out it was meant for me, which it wasn’t?

Dave: Apparently, you have been identified as the only person in town about whom it’s considered remotely possible you would be reading him.

Walt: Hey, Frank, it says, “In rich and sensuous prose, studded like a mace with knobs of black humour, Boyle invokes the colonial past … Not since Thomas Pynchon has any fresh American writer so cunningly lit the fuses of history so that they detonate in time recently past.” Well hell, send it to that Thomas guy over on Tyler, who else?

Dave: You, yourself, are studded like a mace with knobs of black humor, so . . . good detective work.

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