Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1657: The World Turned Upside-Down, Part 2

 

Background:  <=24¢/KWH

Yesterday I calculated the cost of running a Prius Prime on electricity versus gasoline.  At the current U.S. average of $3.24 for a gallon of gas, electricity is the cheaper fuel for a Prius Prime if and only if it costs 24 cents per kilowatt-hour or less.

That calculation was prompted by the claim that in much of New England, it’s now cheaper to run a Prime on gas, rather than electricity.  As it turns out, that’s true.  As of September 2022, most of New England faced electricity prices that exceeded that threshold.  (As did the average price in California.)  I’m guessing that New England rates have gone up further since September, owing to a recent spike in the price of natural gas.

Source:  US EIA.

In a previous rant (Post #1548), I had already noted how expensive public charging stations were.  Not only did I find the one I tried to use to be both baffling and unreliable, you can pay anywhere from $0.50 to $1.25 per KWH for the privilege of using one.  Even last summer, when gas was expensive, it was cheaper to buy gas for the Prius Prime than to charge the battery at the commercial charging station I visited.

I’ll note in passing that there didn’t seem to be anything unique about the Prius Prime in this gas-versus-electricity calculation. I did the same calculation for a PHEV Volvo getting gas mileage about half that of the Prius, and came out with just about the same break-even price for electricity compared to gasoline.  The Volvo simply uses more of either gas or electricity per mile.

The upshot is that, at current gas and electric prices, some fairly large segments of the public will not see fuel cost savings from electric transport.  At the moment, that’s pretty much the entire population of New England and California.  (Though I did not factor in generally higher gas prices in California.)  And, likely indefinitely, that includes people who can’t charge at home and so must use a commercial charging station.

How large?  California and New England together account for about 14% of the U.S. population.  More importantly, near as I can tell, about a third of U.S. residents live in something other than owner-occupied or single-family housing.  Assuming those folks typically have no option other than commercial charging stations, that means at current gas and electric rates, something close to half of Americans will see electricity as a more expensive motor fuel than gasoline. 

I’m a big believer in electric transport.  But I wasn’t quite fully aware of the large fraction of the population for which there are no fuel cost savings in switching to electricity.  Sure, eventually apartment buildings might all come with chargers.  And sure, gas and electricity prices will vary over time.  But right here, right now, electricity is the cheaper motor fuel for only about half the population.

Tesla?  No thanks.

Which got me to thinking about a name that’s been in the news these days:  Tesla.

When we were shopping for our last car, and eventually settled on the Prius Prime, we considered going fully electric.  But I can’t recall giving even a moment’s thought to getting a Tesla.  And offhand, I couldn’t quite remember why.

So I took a look.

Oh, yeah, it’s because I’m cheap.  And because we buy our cars purely to be practical transport.

In any case, here’s the head-to-head comparison between the Prius Prime and the cheapest Tesla, the Model 3 rear-wheel-drive, courtesy of fueleconomy.gov

To boil it down, the cars are equally efficient as electric vehicles, and are the same size (same total interior volume).  But the Tesla costs almost $20K more, and has less than half the range.

The Tesla is faster, for sure.  But in Northern Virginia traffic, that’s more-or-less completely irrelevant.  My zero-to-sixty time isn’t set by my car, it’s set by whatever pace the inevitable traffic dictates.

I’m sure there are some bells and whistles on the Tesla that you don’t get on a Prius Prime. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t much like the ones we got on the Prius.  The very first thing I switched off, from the factory settings, was the automatic-steering function in cruise control.  I guess if I’m driving my car, I want to be driving my car.  Not having the car second-guessing where I want to be on the roadway.

And, to be fair, the Prius lacks snob appeal. It’s a pedestrian workaday vehicle, suitable for middle-class people who have some sense of concern for the environment.  It’s also exceptionally cheap in terms of lifetime cost-of-ownership.  Or so said Consumer Reports, at some point.

But with a Tesla, you can user their network of superchargers.  And if you have to pay for that, you’ll pay an average of $0.28 per KWH.  (That, per a 2021 article in Motorbiscuit.)  And, duly noted, $0.28 > $0.24.  So even with that dedicated network of branded charging stations, at today’s prices, you’ll pay more to fuel your car with electricity than with gasoline.

But the environment …

In America, we burn an average of 600 gallons of gasoline, annually, per licensed driver.  (Calculated from this reference and this reference).  Driving a Prius Prime, I’m guessing that my wife and I are down to maybe 25 gallons each, per year.  (I have to guess, because we go so long between tanks that neither of us could remember when we last bought gasoline.)  That’s the result of driving mostly on electricity, and otherwise driving an extremely efficient hybrid.

In theory, sure, we could reduce that 25 gallons down to zero by going fully electric.  But, honestly, in the context of my fellow Americans, I can only feel but so bad about the 25 gallons.  And that annual quarter-ton of C02 emissions from driving is probably not the worst environmental sin I commit.

But, as importantly, right now, one of the biggest constraints to electrifying the U.S. fleet is the lack of battery manufacturing capacity.  All the majors are now going full-out to build more battery factories.  There just are not enough traction batteries available to electrify the entire U.S. fleet, and there won’t be for years to come.

So the other way to think of the Prius Prime is that it makes efficient use of a scarce resource:  EV batteries.  The same amount of batteries that will build one EV Tesla Model 3 will build about eight PHEV Prius Primes.  Those eight Primes, displacing standard gas cars, will have a far larger environmental benefit than that single Tesla.

Moreover, that big battery, in the Tesla, is mostly wasted, in the sense that the driver will rarely use the entire capacity of the battery.  By contrast, the PHEV Prius Prime has a much smaller battery, that is fully discharged far more frequently.

From that standpoint, EVs are … wasteful.  As long as lack of battery capacity is a hard constraint on electrifying U.S. transport, we’d get a lot more environmental bang-for-the-buck out of PHEVs than EVs.  For the simple reason that a PHEV has a small battery, and uses it hard.  While an EV has a big battery that is hardly used.

Bottom line:  I just don’t see the fundamental value proposition in a Tesla.  Which means, to me, that people by-and-large were not choosing it based on a simple dollars-and-cents calculation.  And if image was a big factor in the choice, well, based on what I’ve been reading in the newspapers of late, Tesla may face some challenges moving forward.

Post #1656: The World Turned Upside-Down

 

Today my wife came across a thread on PriusChat in which a New Englander claimed that it now cost more to run his Prius Prime on electricity than on gasoline.

After I got done scoffing, I decided to look up the data.  Actually check the facts.  Just as a last resort.

And, in fact, that’s plausible.  With the recent declines in the price of gasoline, and sharp spikes in electricity prices in New England, it’s entirely possible that running a Prius Prime on gas is now cheaper than running it on electricity in that area.

Let me just chuck out a few numbers here, all based on the current EPA ratings of 4 miles per KWH and 54 miles per gallon for a Prius Prime.

First, it’s just math to figure out the break-even price of electricity, for any given cost of gasoline.  That is, the price at which it would cost you the same to power the car with electricity as with gasoline.  Because a gallon gets you 54 miles, and a KWH gets you 4 miles (per the U.S. EPA), just multiply the price of gas by (4/54 =~) 0.074.  So running the Prius Prime on $4/gallon gas costs the same as running it on electricity costing ($4 x 0.074  =) 30 cents per KWH.

Like so.  The “break-even” price of electricity just shadows the actual price of gas:

Source:  Gas price data from the St. Louis Fed FRED system.

Historically, at least in my area, that gasoline-equivalent cost was well above the actual price of electricity.  Hence, the fuel cost for electric-powered miles was well below the cost for gas-powered miles.

But now?  In, say, Boston?  Not so.  Take the red line off the prior graph — that’s your gasoline-break-even cost of electricity — and compare it to the actual cost of electricity in Boston and in the Washington DC area.

Source:  Electric rates via the St. Louis FRED system, e.g., DC electric rates.

And, sure enough, of late, the precipitous drop in gasoline prices, combined with the spike in New England electricity rates, has made it noticeably more expensive to run a Prius Prime on electricity, than on gasoline, in that area.  Although, as you can see from the very bottom line, it’s still cheaper to fill up on electricity than gasoline in the DC area.

Discussion

Apparently the spike in New England electric rates is due to a spike in U.S. natural gas prices, which, in turn, seems to be blamed on the war in Ukraine and the resulting spike in European gas prices.  The general idea being that the New England area is heavily dependent on natural gas for electricity production.

Either way, prices in the natural gas market now seem to be easing.

On the one hand, this raises an interesting advantage of having a true dual-fuel vehicle like the Prius Prime.  Within the limits of your battery capacity, your fuel cost can always be the lesser of the gas or electric per-mile rate.  You are protected from price spikes in either the gas or electric markets.

The question is, is the Prius Prime something of a special case, owing to its overall high efficiency? Or, does this have any strong implications for the per-mile cost advantages of electric vehicles in general?  I think the answer is, I think, the latter.

So, let me do the same calculation on a more typical U.S. vehicle.  Offhand, let me choose a PHEV Volvo, getting a pitiful 2 miles per KWH or equally pitiful 26 miles per gallon of gas.

Source:  2022 Volvo from Fueleconomy.gov

But the key here is “equally pitiful”.  The conversion factor from gas price per gallon, to the equivalent cost in electricity, is calculated just as it was for the Prius.  In this case, with 26 MPG and 2 miles per KWH, the conversion is (2 /26 = ) 0.077, virtually identical to what it was for the Prius.  And that’s because the Volvo uses just about twice as much gas, and twice as much electricity, as the Prius does.

Equally pitiful mileage on either gas or electric.  Which means that, as with Prius Prime drivers in New England, Volvo drivers in New England will also now find it cheaper to run on gas instead of electricity.  Sure, they’re paying twice as much per mile as Prius Prime drivers.  But that’s true whether they are burning gas or electricity.

I should probably do another one or two, to make sure that wasn’t an accidental cherry-pick.  But I’m guessing that what that sharp-eyed New Englander calculated for his Prius Prime applies to much of the dual-fuel gas-electric fleet.  With gas as cheap as it is now, there are spots in the U.S. where the fuel cost of gas is lower than the fuel cost of electricity.

In prior posts, I already showed that recharging your car at typical commercial-charger rates already costs more than running it on gasoline.  So if you don’t have a home-recharge option, or can’t recharge for free, there are no fuel savings from converting to electricity.  This means a significant fraction of the U.S. market may have little financial incentive to go electric.  This latest analysis just shows that unless those electrical rates come down, entire geographic areas of the U.S. will be in the same fossil-fuel-powered boat.

Post #1654: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 1, the set-up.

I’d like to know the level of protection from ultraviolet rays that my current eyeglasses and sunglasses provide.  In this post, I don’t actually do the test, but I set up all the background information.  The test has to wait for materials to arrive from Amazon. Continue reading Post #1654: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 1, the set-up.

Post #1653: The life table as the cure for lucralgia.

 

As we approach the end of the year, I think about my final charitable donations for the year.

“Give all you have to the poor, and follow me.”  You can find that said, as the supposed words of Jesus,  in one form or the other, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In fact, in the most radical interpretation of those various passages, one cannot follow Jesus unless one does that.  “Easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter heaven”.  And all that.

How nutso is that? 

I mean, just work out the literal implications of that for the modern U.S. suburbanite.

“Honey, I’m selling the house, the cars; liquidating the IRAs and the investment accounts; and giving all the proceeds to the church.  We and our children can live as beggars.  But it’s OK, we’ll get our reward in heaven.”

One might plausibly expect some negative feedback to that plan.  As in, I’d expect to be declared mentally incompetent if I tried to do that.  That’s how contrary to any sense of self-preservation or self-interest that particular piece of New Testament wisdom runs.  If you actually tried it, the courts would stop you, one way or the other.  For your own good.  Because no rational individual would do that.  They would assume you were nuts.

But is that necessarily true?

Lucralgia

When I was a much younger man, I made up the term “lucralgia” to describe something I felt from time to time.  It’s a portmanteau of lucre (money), and -algia (pain).

It’s that special pain you feel when giving away a significant sum of money.  It’s the “hurts” in “give ’til it hurts”.  I suspect that each person’s sense of lucralgia sets an upper limit on their charity, barring those who literally follow the rules of their church (e.g., literal tithing).  You can only stand to give but so much.

I’ve always felt inadequate, somehow, in my philanthropy.  You’re supposed to feel cheerful and upbeat about all the good your doing by contributing to worthy charities.  All those babies saved, trees hugged, and whatnot.

But all I ever felt was a vague sense of duty.  And lucralgia.  That ache behind your solar plexus when you do your duty and sign a bunch of checks to worthy charities.

No joy.

The life table.

Those of us in the business know it.  Actuaries.  Health economists.

For the rest of you, find your line.  Then read ’em and weep.  This is an excerpt from the 2020 U.S life table, showing how likely it is that, all other things equal, 100,000 Americans will live past a certain age.

Source:  CDC

The life table as the cure for lucralgia, or the rewards for a lifetime of hard work.

Here in the U.S.A., if you work hard, succeed financially, invest with wisdom, and live modestly, and generally are lucky enough to have all suns shine, you will eventually be rewarded with the epiphany that you will die before you can spend all of your money.

I am one of the fortunate ones who has met the criteria.

Perhaps less fortunately, I figured this out, for myself, a few years back.  Maybe  it’s because I am a health economist, working mainly with Medicare data.  But I was completely familiar with the life table.  And when I slapped that up against an estimate of expected financial returns — that’s when I retired.

The truly weird thing about that is that once you reach that realization, then, rationally, as long as you place little or no value on passing your money on to your kids, then the value of money is zero.

If the checking account balance is going to be massively positive on date-of-death, then, what’s the value of another $1000 more or less?  It’s zero. 

You can’t take it with you.

An aside for my favorite economist-religous joke.

Old Mr. McGill is getting on in years.  He’s exceptionally well-to-do, but never married and has no close relatives.  All throughout his life, he’s donated millions to the Church.  But all he has now, in life, is his fortune.

So he asks the parish priest if he can take his fortune with him when he dies.  And he gets the stock answer, no, you can’t take it with you.

Not satisfied, he kicks it up the Church hierarchy, based on his history of massive charity toward the Church.  At some point, the Pope Himself communes with God.  And, lo and behold, in this one case, God will make an exception.  The decision comes down.  Mr. McGill can take it with him.

Overjoyed, Mr. McGill starts liquidating his assets, converting everything to gold bars and stacking them in a big aluminum suitcase.  Block upon block of the precious metal.  And, as is so often the case, as he almost got that suitcase filled, he suffered a massive stroke and died.

And there he went, suitcase in hand, off to heaven.

St. Peter met him at the gate, took one look at Mr. McGill and his suitcase, and said, “Nope, you know the rules.  You can’t take it with you.”

To which Mr. McGill replied, “There’s an exception in my case”.

St. Peter promptly conferred with God, found out that this was true, opened up the Pearly Gates, and waved Mr. McGill into heaven.

“But,”, said St. Peter, “I have to know.   What was so important that you couldn’t leave it back on Earth, but had to drag it with you to Heaven?”

And McGill gets a big smile on his face, places his suitcase down, and opens it up to display the contents.

Said St. Peter, incredulously:  “You brought pavement?”

Lucralgia no more

My point is that, if you get old enough, and have enough, it’s all just so much pavement.

As a consequence, what hurt badly as a young man doesn’t sting any more.  Inverse Widow’s Mite, I guess, as long as I’m in New Testament mode.  I’ve found the solution for lucralgia.  Or it has found me.

Weirdly, I’m still as cheap as ever.  All those habits of thrift, ingrained over a lifetime, continue to function.

But when it comes to writing those checks at the end of the year, it’s just not the painful chore it once was.  I still find no joy in it.  It’s just something that needs to be done.  But I no longer have to fight down that pain as I sign my name.  It’s just another chunk of pavement.

Post #1651: My mice need aroma therapy.

 

 

I’m just about to order some essential oils for my mice.  Along with an essential oil diffuser.  The poor things seem a bit stressed of late, and I figure that a bit of aroma therapy might help them more nearly align their chakras and generally improve their auras.

That’s sarcasm.  Mostly.

Mice are vermin.  Full stop.  Yet I am, in fact, purchasing an essential oil diffuser and some essential oils for my mice.

It’s as logical as 1-2-3. 4 maybe 5.

1:  Mice like my garage.

Source:  Clipart library.com

I’m now into Swedish Death Cleaning, the Garage Phase.  Just another in an ongoing series of attempts to get rid of stuff.

Currently I’m going through my detached garage.  Figuring out what can be given away.  What’s good for scrap metal.   What’s trash.  What has to go to the household toxic waste station at the local dump solid waste transfer station.  And so on.  The idea is to return this space to its original intended use a hobby woodshop.

But for now, the main issue is that it’s filthy.  Just filthy.  And the principal source of the filth is mice.  And all that mice do.  And do.  And do.  In every conceivable location in that garage.

So, as long as I’m cleaning it out, I want to add some rodent repellents.  Ideally, some effective rodent repellents.

2:  Mice hate peppermint.

Or so they say.

It’s not as if I haven’t tried rodent repellents before.  It’s just that what I’ve tried has failed.  And, I suspect that, as with my long and winding road for deer repellents, what will and will not work will be highly dependent on circumstances.

In any case, there appears to be some research suggesting that, if given alternatives, mice will stay away from areas heavily scented with peppermint, cinammon, wintergreen, and similar.  Let me just summarize that by saying that mice hate peppermint.

3:  Commercial mouse repellents are expensive, per unit of peppermint.

So I go to the Home Depot website and look up their top-rated mint-based rodent repellent.   They will cheerfully sell me a gallon of it for $34.  Reading the fine print, I see that what they are selling me is a gallon of water, with a little squirt of peppermint oil in it.  Above, the first ingredient is soap, followed by 0.5% peppermint oil.

So I’d be paying $34 for a little over half an ounce of peppermint oil.  Call it $60 an ounce or so.  Plus some other stuff.  Of which, arguably, the cinnamon oil has value as a rodent deterrent.

(I note, parenthetically, that I have tried “sachet-style” rodent repellents before, without notable success.  Hence my focus on liquids.)

4:  Peppermint essential oil is cheap, but volatile.

Source:  Amazon.com

Meanwhile, on Amazon, I can buy four ounces of peppermint essential oil (of unknown quality) for maybe $12.  Plus, it’s Energizing!

That price strikes me as about fair, as the stuff is more-or-less a weed.  My wife has mint patches established in several flower gardens, and it’s not so much a question of cultivating it, as keeping it in check.

As a bonus, the comments show that people do, in fact, use it as mouse repellent.

The drawback is that you need to keep reapplying it.  Recommendations seem to be to strew oil-soaked cotton balls around, and re-soak them once or twice a week.

That’s way too much work.  There has to be a better way to do this.

5:  Essential oil delivery systems are cheap.

Source:  Amazon.com

People who are into essential oils as room fragrances use some sort of system to deliver the scent.  You can simply warm a puddle of oil.  You can mix the oil with water and run it through an ultrasonic humidifier.

Or, you can buy a gizmo that will periodically spritz the essential oil into the air.  Said gizmo generally being called an “air freshener”.

In the end, I went with the $11 Air Wick Essential Mist.  It’s a battery powered air freshener that uses a small bottle of essential oil, and spritzes that into the air every few seconds, eight hours a day.  Again, per those useful Amazon comments, you can pry the lid off the bottle and replace the contents with the essential oil of your choice.  Each fraction-of-an-ounce bottle should be good for about a month.

As mice are nocturnal, I’ll set that up to spritz at night.

The only obvious negative is that, by reputation, these eat batteries.  But with an exposed battery compartment, that can be easily fixed by hard-wiring a wall wart to replace the three AAA batteries.

Edit:  Contrary to what The Internet told me, pure peppermint oil does not work with this device.  It won’t atomize it, or, at least, not at unheated-garage temperatures.  I redid this, mix pure peppermint oil roughly 50/50 with vodka.  That now seems to be working.  The upshot is that you need to thin the oil, and it looks like vodka (water and alcohol) will work OK.

Ergo, my mice need aroma therapy.  Q.E.D.

As I said, completely logical, linear and rational.  My little air-freshener-as-mouse-repellent costs about $25 to set up, and the four-ounce bottle of peppermint oil should last for maybe half-a-year.  That’s all plus-or-minus battery replacements.  And it will require monthly maintenance to refill the essential oil container.

If nothing else, the garage is going to smell a whole lot better than it does now.

It might even keep the mice away.  We’ll see.

Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

 

A man with one watch knows the time.  A man with two watches is never quite sure.

And so it goes with methods to impute the “true” counts of official new COVID-19 cases, based on the increasingly sketchy reporting.  I now have two methods for doing this — neither of which is without flaws — and both are telling me that, out of the blue, U.S. new case counts are now rising. Continue reading Post #1650: COVID-19 cases are rising?

Post #1649: Capital Bikeshare at Tysons: 170 slots, 14 locations, 6 round trips a day.

 

This final bit of analysis of Capital Bikeshare is here just in case anybody in Vienna actually believes the cheerleader-style reporting you may read regarding  Capital Bikeshare.

Here’s the actual use of the Bikeshare racks around Tysons, for the past 12 months. To understand this, realize that the underlying unit of data is a “trip leg”.  It’s a transport of a bicycle from one rack to another, or, in the case of a round trip, from one rack back to that same rack.  E.g.  if you rode one of these bikes from the Metro station to work in the morning, and then back in the evening, that would be two trip-legs.

To get a better estimate of the actual number of users, I divide trip-legs by two to get “trips”.  (Except for round-trips, for which each one counts as a trip).  I’m betting that in most cases, this is a far better estimate of the number of unique users on any given day.

Then, I divided these 12-month totals by 365 to get them on a per-day basis.

The upshot is that, on a typical day, the entire Capital Bikeshare investment in the Tyson’s Metro area — 14 racks, total of 170 bike slots, and an unknown number of bikes — typically benefits six people.

Let me point out that this is a mostly-mature system at this point.  Most of those racks have been there for years now.  And let me further point out that it looked just like that the last time I analyzed the data for Tysons Metro in isolation.  And it looks like this out in the far Maryland ‘burbs as well. And in Reston.

If you can look at that, and say, oh, boy, let’s spend a quarter-mil to install those in my Town  — then let’s pay Lyft (the owner of the company that operates Capital Bikeshare) whatever annual maintenance they charge, on top of that.

If you can say that, then I think you and I live in alternative realities.

I don’t even care if it’s somebody else’s tax dollars paying for it. Building more of these, when we already know what the outcome looks like out here in the exurbs, is just the worst kind of government.

In case anybody wants to check my work — nobody ever does — the underlying data are here:  https://ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data.

Finally, let me reiterate that in the central urban core of the DC area, Capital Bikeshare is a fine idea and it works well.  (I’ve said that in almost all of my prior posts on this topic, and repeat it here to be sure that you understand I am not anti-bike or anti-Capital-Bikeshare.)  The heavy use of the bikes in that area contributes to a reasonable cost-per-ride.  But in those areas, a) there are lots of nearby places to go from and to, where racks can be sited, and b) as I recall, a typical bike rack slot turns over an average of six times a day.

In other words, there are maybe two-orders-of-magnitude more riders per bike slot in the dense urban core than in the far-flung suburbs.  Bikeshare provides value in that urban core.  It does not out here.

Realistic transportation policy needs to recognize that and be shaped accordingly.  Early on, local governments could be forgiven for taking a chance on a technology that, in hindsight, just doesn’t work out here.  Now, by contrast, with all the accumulated evidence, there’s no longer any excuse.  We know it doesn’t work, in the sense of having an outrageous average cost per mile of transportation, due to negligible use rates.  Why are we still expanding it?

Post #1648: Perhaps I’ve done a bit too much on-line shopping of late.

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I sat alone with Siri,
Christmas presents still to purchase, Cyber Monday deals to score,
     There perched I with nerves now snapping,
     packages in need of wrapping,
Gifts awaiting Christmas trappings, overlapping on the floor.
“Tis the season” grumbled I, “all glory that there isn’t more.”
Else I’d never find the floor.

Ah, so vaguely I’d remember, items ordered mid-November
As a Costco member, now were squatting glumly by the door.
     Eagerly I wished the morrow;—
     vainly I had sought to borrow
From my charge-cards I might borrow happiness from days of yore,
For the spirit of the season urges buying more and more,
Overnighted to my door.

Then my mind seized on the burden, gaze ashamèdly averting
From the pile of acquisitions spilt across my kitchen floor.
     So that now, bank-balance bleeding,
    poverty I’ll soon be pleading,
To my creditors unheeding I shall pay forevermore.
Bankruptcy shall be proceeding, that is where my life is borne.
Christmas spendthrift to the core.

Presently a doorbell-ringer forced me not to longer linger,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
     Packages they need a-wrapping,
     creditors may come knee-capping,
Sorrows I was now recapping, yapping as I crossed the floor.
“Wouldst thou stay, converse a moment?” —here I opened wide the door;—
Packages and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams of Fridays Black no shopper dreamt before;
     Etsy with their goods bespoken?
     Hoping nothing had been broken,
And my only thought unspoken was that I would buy no more!
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the words, “Oh, sure”—
This I heard, and nothing more.

Dragging boxes undiscerning, sinews of my back now burning,
Soon, again, I heard a tintinnabulation as before.
    “Mayhap”, said I, “Barnes and Noble?”,
    breaking from my trance immobile,
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Lamentation to dispel with caissons bearing lit’rature?—
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Motionless amidst the clutter, gazing outward toward the gutter,
Up now stepped a stately Postman, clothed in blue to reassure;
     Not the least obeisance made he;
     not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with bureaucratic mien of those who serve whom they abhor,
No kindness shone, nor outright malice, standing at my entry door.
“Sign”, spake he, and nothing more.

Then amidst my sad stockpiling, could not help myself reviling,
Poker face and postal uniform that he so blandly bore.
     “You, man, are a public servant,
     surely you must be observant,
Tell me what the sender’s name is ere I sign my name once more.
Alibaba? Ebay? Target? Amazonians galore?”
“Matters not, you will buy more.”

Much I marveled this ungainly fellow to discourse so plainly,
Answer so offensive, ‘neath my breath I sotto voce swore;
     Yet amid this Christmas season,
     no soul capable of reason
Could deny the reasonableness of his prophecy of more.
Flesh or spirit, care not I, deliver boxes by the score!
“Sign”, saith he, and nothing more.

For the Postman, standing lonely at the threshold, he spoke only
That one phrase, as if his world admitted but that single chore.
     With his mail-sack then he puttered,
     not a further word he muttered.
Thought I — might I utter phrasing, solely him to reassure?
“U.S.P.S. is my fav’rite, other shippers I deplore.”
Saith the Postman, “oh, for sure”.

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “The Post Office badly lacks esprit-de-corps.”
     Doubtless the Postmaster General
     glories in this true disaster
Of a workforce who no faster than a snail our burdens bore—
Till the packages we wait for — are but ghosts on Lethe’s shore.
Post December 24.

Ignore now this Postman’s riling, other places call beguiling,
Best Buy, Zappos, Wayfair, Walmart, to me now these all implore.
     Time is wasting, I was thinking,
     Christmas is upon us sinking.
Shopping days are shrinking, slinking past the deadlines I abhor.
Mystery of kraft-wrapped beauty, parcel that I so adore!
Sign for it, then order more.

Signed I now without obsessing, gave me now his Postal blessing,
Knowing not the sender, tossed the package by the kitchen door.
     Turning now to be about
     his still-unfinished postal routing,
Humming dirges that his doubting melancholy burden bore.
Leaving, he could not restrain from off’ring up one parting score:
“I’ll return, you shall buy more.”

Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if man or devil!—
How payest I for all these goods that you deliver to my door?
     Christmas spending goes undaunted,
     in my home by lenders haunted,
Driven to me by my lack of lucre for the deals I score.
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Postman, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, friend or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get ye gone onto your route and bring me goods o nevermore”.
     Leave no package as a token
     of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my poverty unbroken!—mat of welcome step no more.
Take thy bag from off my stoop, and take thy form from out my door!”
Quoth the Postman “Nevermore.”

Source:  (c) 2022, Christopher Hogan, with considerable theft from Edgar Allan Poe.