Apparently I have something wired wrong: my reward center releases dopamine when I click “order” on the internet. Work a lot, reward a lot, of course. The neighbors whose hallway is full of my packages have to pay for it. In our apartment building, my mail often ends up with the friendly young family on the first floor. A little Manhattan of cardboard boxes piles up at her place when I don’t come by regularly to pick her up. She would have the right to let me pay part of her rent, since I already occupy three square meters of her hallway.
In our house, receiving mail is the social lubricant. The family from the first floor also accepts the mail from the strange reptile lover from the third, while he hoards the packages from the student from the fifth. You interact, get to know each other, a face appears alongside the name.
My name is Micky Beisenherz. In Castrop-Rauxel I am a world star. Elsewhere I have to pay for everything myself. I am a multimedia (single) general store. Author (Extra3, Jungle Camp), presenter (ZDF, NDR, ProSieben, ntv), podcast host (“Apocalypse and Filter Coffee”), occasional cartoonist. There are things that stand out to me. Sometimes even upset me. And since their impulse control is constantly stuck, they probably have to get out. My religious symbol is the crosshairs. The razor blade is my dance floor. And my feet are itching again.
The role of intermediary is played by the DHL messenger, who acts as cupid for social contacts, dropping off strangers’ packages on other floors like a kind of speed-dating lottery so that people can meet up. At least as long as you have deciphered the name on the note or know who exactly is meant by “Delivered to: Neighbor”. Because there is often a lack of time, desire or good knees, the delivery person likes to leave the packages on the lower floors. Let those who don’t have to pee in bottles during the day because the stress of their job doesn’t allow anything else traipse down the stairs to their precious shipments.
Once I’ve finally carried the shipment up, I play Tetris with the packages. Consumer goods are rising like sea levels; What was a free corner yesterday is suddenly full. The new jackets that occupy the bench in the bedroom, a scree of shoes in the back, the gigantic stack of books as a Mount Everest of unfinished reading that piles up in the dining room. Buying books is much easier than reading them. An avalanche of things stretches across the old building’s parquet as a result of an uncontrolled rampage. What pleases me crushes me. Not really having that under control is not good.
It becomes downright obscene when I walk through our neighborhood, smartphone in hand, already putting the next product in the shopping cart, and see the homeless people pushing around fewer possessions in a shopping cart than I do on an average Wednesday stored in the neighbors’ hallway. I’m in danger of suffocating in my clothes, and not even 500 meters away there’s someone without legs in a threadbare down jacket in a broken wheelchair sitting in the rain in the evening. The blue bag of discarded clothes has been sitting in the hallway for weeks while they’re freezing outside. It’s crazy.
So every euro given, every note becomes a little indulgence designed to distract me from being a proactive part of this blatant injustice. The fact that in such a situation it should still matter what the man on the ground with the cardboard sign “FOR FOOD” spends the money on almost makes me angry because of the condescension. For us, a piece of cardboard is the leftover from a large order from Zalando – for him it is a sleeping pad.
The shopping cart lasts a lifetime, stuffed into 90 liters of galvanized wire. And no button at the end of the digital promenade on the iPhone.
