Perhaps, we’ve the illusion that plastic is cheap because we compare the number of plastic bags in a cardboard box, versus the number of paper bags in a plastic sack, and decide for ourselves, “yes, it do seem the paper is a bit more dear, but I like the feeling of putting an apple into a paper sack and taking it with me to the library, it gives me a feeling of melancholy for days when an apple cost tu-a-penny, and that was for a half-tupence whore.”
You see, paper bags turn us into spinsters in Brigg, by the Humber Bridge. And plastic bags turn us into messengers of Satan’s rancid asshole.
Plastics, our dear friends, have decided, for some bizarre reason, to market its product with controversy, and a type of free-publicity demonization. They’re smart because no press is bad press.
They know their product isn’t going anywhere. Yeah, you might put your apple into a paper sack, and you might even pay some gonif in St. Pertilence Pass for paper bags packed into a cardboard box! But ultimately, you’re not getting away from plastic, are you sugar lumps?
Because your vaccines are packed in plastic, or maybe glass if someone wants to add some value and some weight. And it’s processed with plastic from the top of the assembly line down. Ditto with pretty much every industry that manufactures anything that goes into your body, from allergy tablets to Chockadiles. We use plastics because plastics do what we need them to do. They don’t react when we don’t want them to react … like glass, but we can control plastics just as much as glass, even more because it can create a molecular-scale barrier that stays flexible. Glass has a tough time with the whole flexibility thing. So plastic is everywhere. And if we don’t want to pull straws from the nostril of some tortoise whom I happen to know is a paid shill for the anti-plastics lobby, because that tortoise and I had some history together back at the petting zoo across from Sloan’s Lake, temporarily erected next to the A&W Root Beer. Tortoise knew it was easier to make coin doing piercing promos for the anti-plastics lobby than doing what tortoises are supposed to do, which is demonstrate the humans’ ghoulish ways dethroning the reigning king of the evolutionary longevity race the tortoise. And then we kill the rolly pollys, because they’re so dang adorable like that, rolling up in that little ball when they get scared or getting crushed or running out of water in the little sacs of water around their gills. They’re little blue-blooded angels, those rolly pollys, just like the Horseshoe Crabs, made their fortune in copper rather than iron. And the human blue-bloods no longer find us mere human employees to be much of a threat to their evolutionary longevity race. So now they’re going after whatever fucking animals has a straw up its nose these days.
Plastics need to stay out of the ocean, because the ocean is a fragile environment. The ground is less fragile, solid soil and such. It’s still damaged, but we can control it to a larger degree. And eventually we can gassify the stuff in that garbage dump, pump epoxy into every pore of every piece of trash and Atari video game cartridge and that condom with a needle hole in the tip. (Shit happens, son. Check your family jewels or find someone to check them for you. What’s the name of that guy? Shlomo The One Nut Wonder? He had a shitty left, he had a shitty right, but damned if loosing that nut didn’t make him an angry asshole in the ring. He just kept punching and punching until the ref told him to stop. Check your shit son, keep it tight. If you don’t have insurance, then ask Siri, or Google, or whatever robot is going to deliberately give you the wrong information in order the thin the planet of men with diseased prostates and knotted-up astronaut launch tubes.) We can pump the dump with epoxy, wait for it to harden, and then slice through it with a giant stone breadcutter, ship the slaps of garbage-stone to a showroom in Ulaanbaater, where the trillionaire’s wife picks out the garbage stone she wants for the garbage stone counters in her guest house.
My point is this … plastics are sometimes good, and sometimes they are not necessarily good. If you grab a nectarine and insist on putting it inside a disposable bag, then I think you’re not really appreciating what Mother Nature had to do to bring that nectarine to you. First of all, she had to make all kinds of nature to evolve trees, and then make animals to want to eat tasty foods like nectarines and shit out the seeds far and wide. And then she had to make a bunch of maniacs and assholes who decided that they would find a way to graft a bunch of trees together to make nectarines. That second part was probably pretty easy, now that I think about it.
You pull this perfect little fruit from the bowl, it has come through hell and high water to get to you, shivered in the cold Western Slope nights, sucked up all the moisture it could in the sun-baked Western Slope afternoons. And Mexicans got it off the tree, even if it was an Australian ski bum that actually handled it, she was still a Mexican, because Colorado was either Mexico or it was Cheyenne or Lakota. And if you’re trying to keep a bunch of nectarines from bruising themselves, then you’re in the part of Colorado that grow things, and that’s more likely to be down to the South a bit more, the Indians were usually more up North. (That’s the way it was back then, she actually went to North High School, same school a chunk of my family punched through, and she used to usually go barefoot. She wasn’t one of those “fighting Indians” she told her sister, she was “one of the basket-weaving Indians.” I saw her little keychain that night in my Italian car, it had a picture of Mark M. in it. I always liked Mark, he was one of the few non-poseur punks at high school. He loved people, understood people, gave a shit, and he gave this goddess one of his photos in a little keychain slide viewer. I looked through, I said “is his name Mark M.?” She said “yes” and I knew I couldn’t make a move. I liked Mark too much to make a move on his girlfriend. But damned, if I couldn’t see her one more time. I might, but things won’t be the same, will they? She will have seen more pain than she was built to handle, and that peace will be replaced by fear, anger, whatever gets put into the bird seed these days. Better to keep it a memory, just like George Bowling should have done with his old flame and the big fish in the small pond.)
So you get this nectarine, why don’t you just throw it in your bag, actually remember the lovely thing is in there so you don’t smash it under a copy of Cohen Tenoudji, and then when you’re finally ready to enjoy, you sink your teeth into this majestic piece of summer optimism, and it’s as perfect as you always remembered? Usually. Does that piece of fruit even need a bag? Probably not, but we worry that a germ will touch it, because that will kill us, and it’s kind of nasty anyway, germs. I can’t see them, but I’m sure that they must be a form of dirt, of poverty. I don’t know what they are, but they certainly have no place in my life.
Unless they do.
And they do.
“I did it to you again,” she said, as she bit the bottom of the Drumstick off, so that the ice cream would flow down my arm. She has done that many times in a fictional world. But in the real one, I threw the ice cone, without looking, into the street, and it happened to sail through an open window in a Holden, where it hit the driver, and he veered out of control into a crowd of people assembled around the newsstand in Kings Cross, mowing these unlucky humans over like grass in an episode of It’s Literally Just Moving. There was so much death, so many obliterated dreams, as his Holden crushed skulls and ended lives until it finally came to a rest, with hundreds of bodies bowed up in front of the wide nose of the tasteful automobile like snow from a snowplow in the parking lot of the TG&Y. These former humans, now a mess of guts and agony, the result of her biting the bottom off of that ice cream cone. See what you did, you bitch?
That’s why plastic isn’t actually cheap. Because there are costs associated with it that the industry is in some cases still trying to turn a profit. So they’re getting us to use less plastics, so they can raise the price of plastics and finally make some friggen profit on these decades of investment. “There is a great future in plastics” my Satan’s Screaming Asshole. When are these profits going to arrive for the average plastics worker schmucks? Our parents hate us because we make plastics, and we deliberately get tortoises hooked on cocaine and give them free plastic straws, so the other tortoises can know where to get the good blow. Now, where are the great plastics moguls? Where are the plastics kingpins? We have that one guy who makes electric cars, and we have that other guy who’s trying to take over the United States Postal Service by giving free shipping on flat screen televisions. And we have a couple software nerd billionaires, a few other famous rich men and women, Bobs yer uncle. So, where in the great green gonads are the plastics tycoons?
Plastic is cheap because you don’t see the costs that were incurred to bring you a cardboard box filled with plastic bags, or a plastic bag filled with paper bags. And the plastics folks need to make some money on the plastics, just like the paper billionaires hired legendary SEC football coaches. But if you just say fuck-all to the packaging, and wrap your nectarine in a cabbage leaf, and tie it closed with a licorice whip, then you will not need any packaging at all for that part of the nectarine transport process.