Okay, I confess, no one wrote in.

I only feared they would because I couldn’t imagine the U.S. recycling 70 percent of anything, so I checked it out. The only mention of 70 percent regarding U.S. recycling habits I could find was references to it as an achievable goal for ALL recycling, not just paper. Duly noted. We do have to try harder, but that is the American way, no? Yes!

And getting back to the Post Office and its new ad campaign, I found two flyers flogging it recently in my daily dose of junk, I mean BULK mail. Two flyers have come, one an intense pink card with a to do list list headed “Today” telling me all the things that I will do with great speed and ease thanks to the swift and swell new services they offer. Only problem is, while I can now “put a hold on (my) mail from the airport,” I still can’t stop the flow of junk mail coming into my house while I am at home.

Indeed, the only way to escape the daily onslaught of junk mail is to go on vacation–permanently. Leave the country. To that end, I’m checking with a friend who lives in Paris to see what the junk mail stream is like there. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and after I did all the spiffy new things the postal service wanted me to today, I would “have the time to do more of what (I) want.” The other flyer is aimed for the upcoming holidays we’ll all soon be hellbent for. It, too, promises all kinds of labor saving services that will give you “something you can really use. More time.”

Hey, how about the eight months of my life I understand I’ll be spending sorting through all the junk mail I’m forced to receive daily?

And what would I do with those eight months should I magically have them given back to me? Or even the few minutes I save creating my own “holiday postage” (will the Spirit of Christmas save me a special patch of purgatory if I can’t bring myself to read the directions for that trick?)

What will I do with all this new found free time thanks to the U.S. post?

I will blog and then blog some more until Americans everywhere rise up and insist on a national Do Not Mail list. It would be like the Do Not Call list established by the federal government in 2003 which now boasts 145 million phone numbers registered. It’s been extremely effective. The government has even prosecuted several dozen cases of solicitors violating the do not call law and collected $20 million in fines, according to a recent ABC News story.

It’s been so successful that we’ve all lost a favorite topic to complain about. Where our lives were once afflicted with chronic and invasive unsolicited telephone calls,fresh scar tissue blooms.

Now we complain about junk mail.

And I hate complainers. So knock it off and get yourself to http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/ and send a missive to congress to establish a national do not mail registery.

Go, do it now, I’ll be along shortly, I’ve just got a few more piles of important surveys, free gifts, time sensitive material and life improving catalogs to sift through and toss.

Oh, yes, and then I’ve got to stop by usps.com to see how much time they can save me.

Her company, Nine Dragons, China’s largest container board maker, returns it to us as packaging on inexpensive, and oft recalled, made-in-China merchandise. According to the China Daily News, the “Waste Paper Queen” is “extremely” fast talking, still she has yet to talk the Chinese into recyling more of their paper waste. Only 30 percent of their scrap paper is reused, while Americans salvage 70 percent. Most of China’s waste paper is still buried or burned, while our’s is exported to entreprenuers such as Zhang Yin.

America remains number one in paper production, but China is now the world’s second largest producer of paper at 49.5 million tons and the second largest consumer at 54.4 million tons.

So how much paper is that?

I can’t imagine. My mind’s eye got bloodshot trying to picture it.

Artist Chris Jordan resorts to digital imagery to see this kind of stuff. His “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” is an effort to visualize our country’s habits of consumption. He does giant, digitally generated photographs capturing the millions of soda cans, plastic bags, trees cut for mail order catalogs and cell phones we run through in the course of our average consumer days. He does it so we can see what the unimaginable and astronimical look like.

A similar impulse prompted me to start “Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project.” I wanted to see what each day’s demanding demi-mound added up to in the course of a year. My visualization exercise resulted in 157 pounds of shredded junk mail to be installed at the L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City November 9-24.

And since I started the project I have encountered other artists trying to make apparent what we might hear or read about but can’t picture in our minds. Like Stan’s Cafe, a six Brit theater troupe, presenting their performance installation “Of All The People In All The World: The Americas,” at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center November 29-December 30, 2007. They use grains of rice to represent individuals, then measure these into piles both massive and mini to illustrate such statistics as the paltry number of women who have served in the U.S. Senate and the 8 million people living in America’s gated communities. They will use 16.5 tons of rice during the work’s run. It’s a number I find hard to conceive of, so, I guess, I’ll just have to get up there and see it for myself.

What am I supposed to do, wait until next year to be aware? Well, sorry, I AM AWARE ALL THE TIME about the environmental terror that is junk mail. So I’m not telling anyone to go to their site and sign their petitions to encourage congress to create a national Do Not Junk Mail registry, something along the lines of the federal Do Not Call registry that put all those telephone solicitors out of work. They’re not calling you during dinner anymore to sell you cemetery plots or support the troops trash bags because they’re busy stuffing billions of envelopes and addressing millions of tons of catalogs you didn’t ask for. Yes, let’s put them out of a job a second time.

I’d link you to their website so you could start signing the petitions but I didn’t get that far in my blogging tutorial. Just Google them, you’ll get there. I did. The Center for a New American Dream. That’s right

Are they gone?

Okay, I just have to tell you what fun I had before my bruising encounter with the above mentioned Dreamers. I was shoving shredded junk mail instead of bubble pack or foam peanuts into the box of invite cards for our upcoming junk mail installation/happening November 9, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery to ship to my collaborator Barbara Hashimoto for her installation/happening October 20 in Chicago, and feeling pretty darn resourceful, when I started imagining all the great things I could do with shredded junk mail. Why, if that clever Andrea Zittel and her A-Z Advanced Technologies can make pulped scrap household paper into wall panels, why couldn’t I do the same with shredded junk mail? I could sew shredded rows of it into an ante bellum evening gown, or use it to stuff everything from sock puppets to sectional sofas. And if they can make airplanes out of folded paper, why not passenger airliners out of pulped junk mail (it would be light weight but tough–like flying in an egg carton!) Why there’s no end to the wondrous things that can be done with junk mail.

And if I can’t count on the anti-junk mail crowd to keep me up on what’s happening in their cluttered world, I think I’ve found a site that believes in no blogger left behind, a site devoted to publicizing the many positive aspects of junk mail. That site is PostCom.org, the official site of the Association for Postal Commerce. They don’t want us to worry about junk mail overflowing landfills because they have the statistics, the charts and graphs, to prove that there’s a glut of landfill space in America. That’s right. We’re not doing our part to keep America’s landfills full. If anything, we need more junk mail to fill America’s gaping holes.

They also devote a section of their site to “Mail: The American Jobs Machine” “In some sense,” they say, “the Postal Service is like an oil pipeline: It carries a vast amount of material which leads to the creation of other products and services.” Millions of jobs are related to the continued flow of junk mail. How many millions?

“Could there be more than 9 million jobs associated with the mails?,” they ask, and before you can scratch your head, let alone do a finger count, they answer for you with a resounding “You bet.” Sure, I knew the gathering, sorting and tossing of the daily piles coming through my mail slot were a second career for me, and I sensed the annual trip to the commercial shredder in Sun Valley was employing at least one other person on that particular day, but 9 million jobs!?! I had no idea the importance of that humble little paper pile.

I’d love to keep blogging on, tell you about the Chinese billionaire business woman who has made herself richer than Oprah Winfrey by importing America’s junk mail to China, but you’ll have to wait until the next post. I’ve got to go, the dog’s barking and I think the mailman just left another incredibly valuable and filled with endless possibilities deposit from the Postal Service pipeline just inside the front door. I don’t want it staining the rug.

When I shredded this mail myself, an effort that was noisy, time consuming and tedious, I managed to burn out two shredders before I decided to save the mail and let a commercial outfit do the shredding. This seemed like a lot of work for something I didn’t want in the first place.

I realized that each little pile was its own problem to deal with, but what did a year’s worth of this rubbish amount to? I decided the only way to find out was to save a year’s worth of junk mail. Perhaps then I could get a physical sense of our household’s annual share of direct mail deliveries. I began gathering January 1, 2006 and stopped December 31, 2006. It was a year that included moving to a new home in a more affluent zip code that came with an intriguing upgrade in the quality of what was being advertised. Instead of constant solicitations for remodeling, refinancing or credit cards, we were being offered opportunities for luxury cruises, fractional jet ownership and airport limo services.

During the course of that year and in the spare time I had since I stopped shredding the mail, I did some junk mail research. I discovered:

• Americans received 28 billion pieces of junk mail in 1979, and now annually receive, depending on which website you check, anything between 42 billion, 77 billion and 100 billion pieces of junk mail.
• The average American will spend 8 months of their life handling junk mail.
• Junk mail uses more landfill space than disposable diapers and polystyrene foam products combined.
• Forty-four percent of all junk mail goes unopened into the landfill.
• If it’s true, as one source claims, that 100 million trees are cut down to produce junk mail annually, then 44 million trees die annually to make all the junk mail that comes into our homes only long enough to pass through our hands before going directly into the trash.
• In a typical year 1.8 billion pounds of junk mail are undeliverable. Fifteen million trees die to produce this undeliverable pile of unsolicited advertising.
• Fifty-nine catalogs are sent annually to each man, woman, and child. Victoria’s Secret alone sends 395 million catalogs a year.
• Each postal carrier annually carries 18 tons of junk mail.  The post office is the biggest employer in the country next to Wal Mart, with more than 200 thousand mail carriers.
• Mail carriers suffer injuries that can lead to permanent disabilities from the weight of this junk mail. Still, the mail carriers union has lobbied against legislation to prevent or slow the junk mail stream. The post office’s preferred term for junk mail is “bulk mail.”

After learning all this, I felt that even if someone wanted to translate these statistics into numbers of football fields and Empire State Buildings, I couldn’t begin to imagine the physical reality of the American junk mail phenomenon.
While I was collecting the junk mail and its related statistics, I couldn’t help but notice my local mail carrier was wearing a major wrist brace while driving her delivery truck. She had carpal tunnel syndrome, the reason I hadn’t seen her on the job for a long spell. She said it was because of the weight of her daily junk mail deliveries. The holiday catalog season, she said, was “the worst.”

When I asked a post office supervisor if I could stop mail delivery to another address where I do not receive solicited mail, i.e. bills, letters, and magazines I’ve personally subscribed to, I was told that was not an option. If I had a mailbox, they were required to deliver unsolicited junk mail to it. I was required to periodically remove it to enable the delivery of more unsolicited mail. This supervisor explained that direct mail businesses were “our customers” because they paid the postal service to deliver their advertisements to our mailboxes.

Until then I had believed that the American public was the customer of the U.S. Postal Service, a “statutory monopoly” created by Congress and, since 1971, operated as an independent agency of the federal government. To the extent our tax dollars support and sustain this protected federal agency, I believe U.S. citizens are not only forced to pay for this daily trash delivery, but are also being required to volunteer their time to process it. I can’t help but wonder how the eight months of each of our lives might be better spent than sifting through this government authorized trash.  Maybe we should count our blessings, as we sort through our unwanted paper piles, that no other entity besides the U.S. Postal Service is legally allowed to make deposits in our mailboxes.

Early in 2007, I drove the results of my collecting efforts to a commercial shredding facility in Sun Valley, California, where I was able to shred and retain the entire mass. I drove home with seven 45-gallon plastic trash bags weighing a total of 157 pounds. I began to see this accumulation as a rising tide of unwanted mail threatening to drown our cities and suburbs in what I consider a reverse trash stream that steals our time while it pollutes our personal environments.

When I told my artist friend and occasional collaborator Barbara Hashimoto of my efforts, she suggested turning the Junk Mail Project into a dual city effort. In June, she began collecting and shredding the office junk mail of the BauerLatoza Studio, an architectural firm where she is artist in residence, and producing audio and video recordings of this process. The Chicago presentation of the Junk Mail Project’s first phase will be displayed this October 20-21 and 27-28 as part of Chicago Artists’ Month festivities in Hashimoto’s studio in the Randolph Motor Building, a 100-year old former car showroom in Chicago’s historic Motor Row District.

The Los Angeles presentation of the Junk Mail project will be November 9, 2007 through November 24, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery, 2634 South La Cienega Blvd., Culver City. An opening reception will be held November 9, from 6-9 p.m.

Meanwhile, as my household’s share of annual unwanted correspondence erupts from a row of garbage cans in anticipation of the shredding truck’s annual call, I look forward to blogging further on the issues junk mail raises in our contemporary world. Like how much does each citizen pay for the privilege of receiving this modern sludge and what, financially, emotionally and physically is eight months of our lives worth, is the rise of junk mail contributing to the death of newspapers, do crack addicts really have all the time in the world to piece together my personal information from said shreds and wherein lies the art and poetry in a stack of this stuff? Stay tuned…