In a pickle, not norm & going postal

Dear Rachel,

Garage sale… yard sale… We need money for pickleball. So. We have people using the public right-of-way to sell junk from the trunk. Garage and yard sales. So how about the city sell signage that looks great and the moneys go to the parks and rec dept. This will give a lot of money to the city. They would be required to remove the signage that city workers have to remove. After all, they are using our land to make money and pay no taxes. Hey, we have all kinds of rules to live in the great outdoors. SO PAY UP OR SHUT UP. When you get charged with littering by not removing your signs after the sale, after all your address is on the sign… DA… HELLO.

– Penny Pincher

Dear One-Cent Squeezer,

See, this is why I don’t go yard-saleing. I’m certain there are plenty of perfectly good people, with perfectly good junk, in their perfectly good trunks, available at perfectly discounted rates. But I just have this disposition to presume that everyone at yard sales thinks and talks exactly like this letter. You lost me at pickleball, and yet I was held hostage the whole way through, without even a roll of quarters to pay my ransom.

– I’ll take the lot, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

How do we come up with social norms? They can’t be innate to humans because they’re different everywhere you go. Like Europeans, in my experience, don’t care so much about BO. Americans would rather cut off their own arm than risk a stinky pit. I wonder if climate change will also change our socially accepted odor levels?

– Stinky Pete

Dear Smelly Peter,

Well, for one thing, climate change is causing 100 degree weather in England (That’s American degrees, thank you very much). I can’t imagine sitting on the first deck of a double-decker bus in those conditions with people sweating out bangers & mash. And another thing: we’ll all be underwater in 20 years anyway, so what’s it matter?

– Get a whiff of this, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

Well Amazon uses the U.S. Mail for a great cause: making money. Trump wanted to privatize it and put De Joy as head. Well, we used to have three postal centers in Durango, and now one. But do you know we have two mail boxes at 11th St. and E. 2nd Ave.? And one at each City Market and one hidden behind the gas station across from Star Liquor? Hidden gem. Can you tell me how many postal boxes we have in the city? Or is this a Trump plan to stop the vote if he is not in jail in 2024. Just asking.

– U.S. Male

Dear First Class,

Just for you, I dropped everything I was doing to comb the city and tally the mailboxes. But I was foiled again by the sheer audacity of businesses using the Postal Service to ship their goods – for money, no less! I’m no Amazon-stroker, but of the Post Office’s 99 problems, bulk-rate customers ain’t one. Maybe we should host a trunk-junker for the USPS. We could set up miniature stations at each secret drop box. A sale for the mail. 

– Eau de joy, Rachel