I'm getting new envelopes stuffed with information about Medicare every day, some of it official, some of it quasi-official, and some of it from those carrion companies that try to make their pitches look official. I'm inundated with renewal notices or pleas to return to the subscription base from magazines I can no longer afford. All this is on top of the regular junk mail. And I'm now getting stuff from two banks, since I haven't yet gotten around to closing the accounts at the old one. I'm not even sure which ATM I can afford to pull money out of this week, because I can't find the paper with the pin number I need to get my account information out of the bank's automated telephone system.
I'm starting to feel like Tuttle the repairman in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. I'm about to vanish in a swirl of paper. And the one kind of paper I'd be happy to have more of— the sort issued by the Federal Reserve Bank— is ever more scarce. I'm going to spend the rest of the evening glaring at the trees. It's all their fault! If they weren't so easy to turn into paper, the stuff wouldn't be so common.