The new McSweeney’s came in the mail today, a bundle of odds and ends all held together with plastic wrap, bearing the label: McSweeney’s 17: Made to Look Like It Came in Your Mailbox. The topmost piece of “mail” in the package is a full-color advert called Pantalaine, “Provisioners of America’s Finest Plural Clothing,” out of South Bend, Indiana. The featured product? A “unixex snap trainer,” featuring “shared center-leg construction” and the ability to break “in half for quick recombination with compatible Pantalaine snap trainers.” For the low, low price of twenty-nine bucks, who wouldn’t want a pair?

The outer label also promises “a large envelope full of recent art printed on cardboard and good to hang or pin,” but I don’t know that I’ll ever get to the artwork. I mean, I know there’s an actual bound copy of a literary journal or journals somewhere in the package, but I kind of like this amalgamation exactly the way it is. It looks like junk mail, which is to say it looks like all my other mail, which is to say I feel somewhat comfortable with it, not the least bit cowed into reading it, and really, I have so many other things to read–my students’ stories, for example; the copies of Harper’s that have been piling up in my magazine file; the latest issue of Glimmer Train; Michael Guista’s Brain Work,winner of the Bakeless Prize; a whole lotta books by friends whom I won’t name here, because then they’d know that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading their books…

and whatever novels of the Eastern European variety that Kevin’s going to be giving me for my thirty-FIFTH birthday on Saturday, which I still don’t really believe is going to happen, because how the hell can I have reached my mid-thirties without having learned how to baste a turkey or drive a motorcycle or properly change my oil or return phone calls or program an ipod, without having even set foot on two of the continents, without having attended a single Rolling Stones concert or exchanged email addresses with Bill Clinton (I dream about the guy, you know, while Kevin’s dreaming about bowling with Tony Blair).