My trash from all my days is in this Earth somewhere, I realized.
My baby diapers have barely begun to rot away.
|
Takin' out the trash
by Underground Panther in the Sky August 29, 2003
When I used to take out the trash as a kid, I never thought about the contents of the two heavy galvanized steel cans I dragged down our gravel driveway to the curb as anything more than a pain in the ass chore. Years later in my kitchen, I unwrap some cheese, throw away the outer wrapper and a plastic sheet, and another, another ... I toss out a ziplock bag that once held a tomato. I toss a plastic jar since all the pepper is gone, toss a wrapper that once held further wrapped rolls of toilet paper, a broken CD case, some saran wrap, a yogurt container, a straw, a string spool...
| |
Twice a week I lug out a big forest-green plastic can to the edge of my yard, full of grocery bags, water bottles, toothpaste tubes, a broken hairbrush ... I have been doing this throwaway ritual my whole life.
It takes upwards of 2,000 years for plastic to decompose — in optimal lab conditions. That is 20 entire human lifetimes, and that is assuming all 20 live to be 100 years.
|  |
I look at the packaging, the obscene packaging, glaring at each individually wrapped, vacuum sealed mozzarella cheese stick. And I think about it ... again.
My mom is 73 years old and most commercial packaging drives her nuts. She resorts quickly to knives and scissors to cut open what she can't tear or pull according to directions. Often she asks me to lend my teeth or hands to get her through the "attractive" tough-yet-flexible casings designed for selling food — to get at a bit of food. She attacks packaging with gusto, and sometimes she messes up the nicely arranged food or sends the package contents across the kitchen. When this happens sometimes she doesn't buy it again. She's too pissed off at the packaging.
When kittens and many other animals are born, they are encased in a sort of packaging, the amniotic membrane. Mother cats tear this membrane off their just-born kittens and eat it, because that is all she will eat for a couple of weeks, until the kittens are able to be left alone for more than a few moments.
Poor Appalachian people from my mom's generation sadly too often took care of excess cat population problems in their barns by taking and drowning a mother's new kittens in the river in a sack. I hate this. But they didn't have the money to spay or neuter. Such is ignorance and poverty.
But as it goes, packaging (in this case a sack) is not only used to keep the contents in but to conceal the contents from the consumer throwing it away.
When you think of an abortion, the amniotic sac is ruptured first and the contents are sucked out of the womb. So the afterbirth is the husk, the packaging.
Everyday we suck out the nutritious contents from food we get in those splashy packages. And we throw away the wrappers.
Like we suck the oil and life from our home, this Earth we think is a package with goodies inside ... and we do to the Earth as we do with all packages. We throwaway the container, the shell. After we use up the Earth, where will we dump the shell and where will we as a species exist to be able to dump it somewhere?
Since we treat each other as packages, we suck the life out of each other until all that is left is a husk. We like to devour certain brands, and we ignore others — White, Black, Jew, Christian ...
The seduction of packaging obscures the contents and hides the death in the sustenance.
Politics and wordsmithing hide the death in the politicians minds and government/corporate/military policies. We are distracted from the death with pretty colors and big claims.
Likewise wonder, how long does it take the dull blade of the Freedom of Information Act to tear open a package of lies? I see well-meaning information-hungry people fighting the secrecy machines of institutions, and they are frustrated like my mom wrestling with a package of beef jerky ... and not a blade in sight.
Look around at another expensive individual package. This one contains families. Families in America are on contrived display, in three- or four-piece sets: a mother, father, and kids. Success dictates that we should desire to be living in places with names like Upper Crest, King's Gate, Huntington's Crossing, Spenceoloa Farms. Go to the suburbs, and look at the expensive packages containing such atrophied spirits, and observe the ever-consuming hungry ghosts living like stiffened mummified contents within, a product on its way to a sterile job; a package deal.
See the death in them, and feel the depression, fear, loneliness and despair. See the hermetically-sealed suicide in a package of "success" bulging at the seams, threatening to burst its contaminated contents all over this town. All I can do is hope to get out of the way when the lid blows off and the packages no longer can hold them.
What will it take to break the seal, rupture us free of the self-closedness in our pre-packaged beliefs and motivate us to come out of our shells tear open the contents of our minds in denial? What kind of hard hitting, sharp edged, pithy, silver-tongued invasion of Republican faithful homeowners in wombs will bring them out of success and into the world of the dying?
Who wants to leave a good fantasy behind for a horrible reality you helped make, while you were so busy dancing on the roof of your SUV, triumphant with that designer lampshade over your eyes, to the slowing rhythm of the stock ticker, and with a hangover too? Will it be so traumatic, this awakening to our own collective self-abortion? When will we realize each of us holds the sharp coat-hanger up to our own dead-before-it-was-born future?
Will we choke on ourselves when we spew the rancid contents of our own ruptured soul across time and space? Is this why most of the planets in our vicinity are dead?
We don't know what we are really, or how we came to be here on Earth, but the patterns speak even in our dreams. Oh, but we can speculate and fancy ourselves as anything we want to be. Should be and what is are two different things.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the county landfill — or, The End of the Earth — to throw away some more stuff that wouldn't fit in my trash can. When I got out of the car I stood on the edge of a steep cliff face, overlooking a huge pit. There was an immense amount of trash. There were maggots. The dirt in the dump area was very red, and the trash from a distance was a vomitile grey color. It reminded me of what a pus-infected wound looks like.
My trash from all my days is in this Earth somewhere, I realized. My baby diapers have barely begun to rot away.
Six or seven frantic Bulldozer-like things ran around the pit, compacting, moving, backing up, beeping. The trash seemed to go on forever and it did not stop arriving. Constantly cars and trucks streamed in, and people threw more things into the raw wound. One person would dump their stuff and go and another truck to unload would replace it within seconds. Many truckloads of old mattresses, plastic gallon jugs, baby diapers, plastic six-pack holders, plastic chairs, big plastic barrels, plastic kiddy furniture, and plastic more arrived in the 15 or so minutes I was there.
A mountain of death rises in an infected wound. It will sit for 2,000 years, 20 times my entire life (if I live to be 100). I am only 37 now, and how much trash have I thrown away everyday of my life?
Birds flew to scavenge from the refuse in swarms along with the flies. Seagulls, blackbirds, flies, roaches, rats ... humans. An over-ripe, dusty, cloying, stick-to-your-lung-walls characteristic dump stench was everywhere.
As I left, I noticed how all the cars leaving the dump left red dirt tire marks in the black road, like trail of blood as a murdered body is dragged away.
Will it take the political equivalent of a very sharp knife in an aggressive, frustrated hand to send the ever expanding sickening botulized contents of the "American dream" life-package all over the floor, revolting for all to see? Or will it all be hastily popped out, put into another package in a different color, and get sold again? (Move along, nothing to see here... )
Like a premature baby, will this package be rushed to an incubator to die whilst mommy is heavily drugged so she won't remember a damn thing? Or will the package contents be sent to the end of the Earth, buried yet again and forgotten about for years ... until people begin to mysteriously get sick because of what was unconfronted from years ago, what was forgotten about, hastily cleaned up, danger denied because it was put in a nice package?
| |
What seems settled may be unsettled, because it was partly unsealed and sent away stinking, and it's slowly leaking toxic contaminants into the collective unconscious. We all smell it, but we can't figure out that it's coming from us.
|
|
Again today, I take my obligatory can of packaging husks, old food, old things, and death to the curb. A sanitation truck comes to take it away, to help the ending of the Earth. I am sure each of us will contribute a little something today to our own collective deaths. (Panther rattles the trash can opening the lid for further contributions.)
It feels like Iron Eyes Cody, the Indian who was walking in a landfill in that 1970s public service commercial, with a tear rolling down his cheek. To consider your own death in a very real, visceral way is painful enough of an idea. But how does one wrap one's already hurting mind around the obviousness of an entire species' every-day participation with anthro-suicide, with the ongoing homicide of an entire planet without going a little crazy with grief?
It is scary as hell to viscerally understand and grasp the impact of the soul-shattering implications of what we have done, what we still do to ourselves and to this once unique, exquisite, living planet.
© 2003, by the author.
Comments? newsuneed@yahoo.com
|
|
There's much more than this at Unknown News.
|
|
| |
We try not to whine too much or too loudly, but we are poor and this site eats a lot of money and time.
We couldn't do it without the help of our volunteers. And for those who can't afford the time, giving just a buck or two can make all the difference and keep Unknown News alive.
PLEASE VOLUNTEER OR BUY OUR STUFF
OR RUN AN AD OR GIVE WHAT YOU CAN
THANK YOU |
Talk
to Us |
Archives |
| If you have something to say, we'd love to hear from you. |
Click here for archives of recent editions of Unknown News |
|
|
