Candles and Possible Insanity

I got a call from our building manager in New York the other day because FedEx left a 40-pound box addressed to me on our doorstep. I don’t know when we’ll be back from LA, so I tell him to slap another
FedEx label on it and send it on its happy way out west. Who would send me forty pounds of anything, I wondered. And what did they send? I had to wait.

The 40 lbs. of FedEx arrived on my doorstep this evening. And I opened it. And in that gigantic box, were smaller boxes. All filled with candles. By some candle designer named Vance Kitira. Which is very nearly my name.

Now, I knew that there were candles out there that almost had my name on them. The first time I saw them, I thought “Hey, that's weird.” But now I have 40 pounds of them. And I'm thinking that's a little weirder. Who the hell would do this?

I pulled off my building manager’s FedEx label to see what was under it, and I find the original shipping label, and it says this and I'm not kidding:

"Candles

Vince Katrola
New York, NY 10013

Candles.

Vince Katrola Candles
(our address)
New York, NY 10013
Candles."

That’s right: the return address and the shipping address are both mine, and the word “candles” appears far too many times. I thought at first that somebody didn't like their candles, wanted to send them back to the manufacturer, and Googled the wrong name. So I tried that. But this guy Kitira is waaaaay more popular than I am, and there is no bastardization of his name that makes Google think you were looking for me, instead. I'm now left to think that some insane person who knows me in some capacity (and who may or may not be in Phoenix, which, according to the FedEx website, is where the box came from...) lost their mind and sent this package to me.

And got so excited about their joke that they couldn't stop writing “candles” on the address label. The real question becomes: Is someone trying to out-Surrealist a Surrealist?

Vince out.