Terrifying News!

Want to read about something terrifying? I read in the paper about something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. When you're walking down the street and you see all the soda cans and plastic bags and cigarette butts in the gutter, you're not thinking, “where does it all go?!” if you're a regular person and not an environmentalism nut, but it turns out that it all goes into the ocean and not only that, but there's sort of a big catch-all area almost twice the size of Texas, where every bit of garbage that was in the ocean ends up, more or less, so I can add that thing to the list of things to sit around and worry about when I'm not busy worrying about what I'm going to do with my life. And if the Great Pacific Garbage Patch doesn't make you panic! fleeing over the hills to some place you might think is the last safe space, other topics on the list include terrorist attacks on the subway (esp. poisonous gases), global warming, murderers breaking into our apartment while we're asleep and murdering us in our beds, nuclear attack and insects that crawl into your mouth while you're asleep and lay eggs embedded in the soft flesh that makes up the inside of your cheek.

In school, in this class I took on ecological history, someone started yelling about how cars are just big metal boxes on wheels! and that's a totally crazy thing to say, if only because there's a lot of complex mechanics and technology going on under the hood of a car. Also, because people can't all be idealistically perfect all of the fucking time. He also said that everyone should drive hybrid cars, which is a totally awesome idea, if not for the fact that most people probably can't afford a hybrid because they're expensive and most mechanics don't yet know how to repair them so you would have to go back to the dealership if you had to get it fixed. Then other people in the class started to say things like, “yeah, and nobody should use plastic bags anymore and we should all recycle and yell at people who don't” and I'm thinking that this is the thing – the thing- that I hate about people with a strong belief system. It's cool with me if they want to believe in something, but if they're going to go and make other people feel bad for not believing in the same something, and if they're going ignore the fact that some people just can't afford -either monetarily or otherwise- these proposed “solutions,” then they're not really solutions, are they? Just like those plates and cups and things that are made out of corn and they're supposed to be biodegradable, but they actually don't break down at all, so how is this cutting down on our waste? It just isn't, but it makes people feel better about themselves, like they're working towards something.

Even so, this Great Pacific Garbage patch is really bothering me a whole lot, because it's not going to get any smaller, although at least it's not moving, because when I heard about it first, someone told me that it was like a whirlpool that was headed our way and it seriously freaked me out, but it's just sitting there, accruing more garbage. Which is awful, and there isn't any way to fix it. That's the thing with all the stuff on my list: I'm completely powerless to prevent any of it from happening, except maybe being attacked by a murder in my sleep, because we have a chain that goes on the door and I'm not sure why anyone would want to break into our apartment and kill us anyway.