Back on the street

I went out to get fresh blood today because I didn't trust the old stuff. On my way back home, I swung by the library to more thoroughly search the shelves for volume 1 of Transmetropolitan, a quest that met with no success. The computer catalog claimed that it had been checked in since September, but there was a conspicuous empty space where it should have been in physicality, a hiccup in the Dewey Decimal stream.

Unruffled, I went to the comic book store down the street; every volume of the series was on the shelf. Well, every volume but one--the first one, the one I needed. How suspicious, thought I, but chalked it up to unhappy circumstance and went instead to Prairie Lights, where I was stunned to discover that there was not a single volume of Transmetropolitan to be found. And then I knew that I had stumbled upon a city-wide conspiracy so sinister, so diabolical that it could confound the senses and render a casual observer incapable of perceiving the threat. Unheimlich.

Walking along the backways, I passed a house with an honest-to-gods tower: round, and capped with a three-foot spire. I knew instantly that the house's inhabitants were somehow connected. No one has roofs that pointy unless they are involved with some seriously shady dealings.

Just before I crossed the final street, I noticed something that had been on that corner for years but which I had never remarked upon: a standard blue government-issued mail dropbox. Commonplace enough, but not so mundane considering that just across the street is another dropbox. Why would there need to be two so close to one another? Clearly, one of them was suspect. But who could be responsible? Surely not W.A.S.T.E., though it would be clever for them to disguise their operations in the colors of their sworn enemy. The government itself made for an easy scapegoat; after all, the United States Postal Service had been putting me through the wringer all semester, withholding my mail, testing my nerve, pushing me to the edge with their deliberately discombobulating decrees and guidelines. I had been weighed and measured and, to all appearances, released from my ordeals. And I've seen my father, longtime employee of the USPS, transcribing data in his journals. Keeping tabs.

Well, you can scribble all the psychoanalytical notes you want. Even as you monitor me, I am observing you. And I, a contentious product of these postmodern postliterate postselfretentive posting-obsessed times, can blog with the best of them.