Happy New Year
Month: December 2013
Fear
Grief
Desire
The rate of flow
I was inspired in this by a beautiful piece of writing by Donovan Hohn, which has stayed with me ever since I read it in Harper’s magazine in 2007. I think it was the thing that first got me thinking about plastic. (Hohn has written his own striking book on this topic, Moby Duck, where this passage also appears):
“I’ve begun to notice currents everywhere, a universe of eddies and gyres. Phytoplankton ride the same ocean currents that carried the Floatees to Sitka. Zooplankton follow the phytoplankton. Fish follow the zooplankton. Sea lions, whales, and people follow the fish. When, at the end of their upriver journey, salmon spawn and die en masse, their carcasses — distributed by bears, eagles, and other scavengers — fertilize the forests that make the fog, which falls as rain, which changes the ocean’s salinity. All deep water travels along what oceanographers call the “conveyor belt,” which begins with warm water from the Gulf Stream draining into the North Atlantic, where evaporation increases the salinity and makes it sink to the ocean floor, where it creeps south into the Antarctic circumpolar stream. After a thousand years — a millenium! — the conveyor belt ends here, in the North Pacific, where the ancient water wells up, carrying nutrients with it. I’m becoming a devout driftologist. The only essential difference between rock, water, air, life, galaxies, economies, civilizations, plastics … is the rate of flow.”
fake alligator strap
plastic I collect on my daily walk
GREEN SEEDLESS TABLE GRAPES RAISINS VERTS DE TABLE SAN PÉPINS with rows of round holes for the grapes to breathe through
G SERIES THIRST QUENCHER FIERCE® GRAPE NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR Water, sucrose, dextrose, citric acid, natural and artificial flavor, salt, sodium citrate, monopotassium phosphate, modified food starch, glycerol ester of rosin, blue 1, red 40.
foam eyeball bloodshot with bright yellow iris, kind of crackling like flame or lightning
little pale green foam peanut packing thing (LPGFPPT)
white foam packing fragment
shards of Peet’s glass with sea blue vaguely Mycenaean pattern
fake alligator strap
BIMBO® Donas Sugared Donuts cartoon of white bear wearing apron and puffy chef’s hat with red B on the front seeming squeezed, almost knocked off balance between two giant donuts. Eyebrows raised and blue eyes with thick eyelashes opened wide, mouth agape, pink tongue and row of white teeth. The bear is bringing a donut bit the size of its head toward its open mouth.
Kathy Kaye™ POPCORN BALL scary moon and trees cartoon with jack o’ lanterns
tiny lychee candy wrapper
We are all the lugworm
New research demonstrates that the lowly lugworm (Arenicola marina) absorbs toxic concentrations of pollutants from microplastic in sand. Here is this piece from October in which I imagine being inside the gut of a lugworm. We all are inside the gut of a lugworm, of course, because that is the base of the food chain. Thanks to Susan Freinkel for pointing out this research.
Women are plastic men are metal
Quote from a 1943 U.S. War Department guide for managers called You’re Going to Hire Women: “Women can be trained to do any job you’ve got — but remember ‘a woman is not a man.’ A woman is a substitute — like plastic instead of metal.”*
*quoted in Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (3): 455-483
12/9/13 LEAVE WORRY BEHIND
plastic I collect on my daily walk
Hand-Scooped Ice Cream Shakes & Malts™ cup, disembodied hand with scoop of ice cream emerging from sunburst, somewhat threatening, yellow star smiling outlined in red® ©2011 CXE Restaurants, Inc.
Tootsie Roll® POP ARTIFICIAL CHERRY red wrapper cartoon of kid with fishing pole, boy playing with model airplane, ice skating girl, two surfers, boy and girl, boy swimming, kid tossing a football, back to us, two girls roller skating, a boy and girl grasping a flag and kind of bowing, boy cut off at the neck with headdress aiming an arrow at a star TOOTSIE ROLL INDUSTRIES, INC. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MADE IN U.S.
LEAVE WORRY BEHIND jiffy lube® sticker 150568 MILES 12/2/2013 OR-491GQF PENZ 530
smashed ORGANIC BABY SPINACH 5 0z. box INGREDIENTS: organic baby spinach leaves. Distributed by the Kroger Co. Cincinnati, Ohio 45202 http://www.simpletruth.com PET recycling symbol
A Chekhov quote on her skirt
all the plastic I collect on my daily walk
single-armed angel with white bow and a Chekhov quote on her skirt
some kind of space gun, grey, badly scraped
three clear lids found in a clump on the sidewalk
green soda bottle lid and top
purplish blue cap
wrapper for QUIESCENTLY FROZEN PREMIUM ICE CREAM BAR PALETA DE CREMA ALL NATURAL FRESA STRAWBERRY HELADOS MEXICO
HARIBO® KIDS AND GROWN-UPS LOVE IT SO, THE HAPPY WORLD OF HARIBO wrapper yellow cartoon bear with red bow saying ORIGINAL in speech bubble, fruit and flying (falling?) gummi bears at its feet GOLD-BEARS® GUMMI CANDY LESS THAN 1/2 OZ.