On The Eighth Day God Made Plastic

 

 

Long long ago, in a land far far away I was watching a commercial on TV. You remember TV. It sat in the former den where families would congregate and discuss, well, family things. With the advent of television such discussions were surrendered to the production of a world beyond the den. Anyway, the method devised to allow this medium to be free was known as the commercial. Every fifteen minutes a commercial would tell us all about something we’d never heard of the day before that after the commercial we couldn’t live without. Ronco comes to mind. Cutting an onion with a steel knife was so last year when you could mince the onion with a simple slap of the wrist. And it, and practically all new improvements to the human condition were made out of plastic!

 

Plastic could be incorporated into anything. From a veggie cutter to a life-sized Barbie should you get lonely. And it was totally safe! And cheap. No anvil needed. Just pour the soup in a mold and voila! A fully functioning Michael DeBakey heart or a vibrator, whatever suits your fancy. The commercial I was watching showed a man at a party pointing his index finger in the air and telling another man, “One word, Plastic!” Plastic could save you from Hell if you could blow a bubble big enough to put it in.

Touch Me!

 

Soon everything was made of plastic, covered in plastic or thrown away in plastic. When my Aunt died she was displayed in a plastic coffin with an authentic looking oak grain finish and a trap door on the bottom. When the service was over, and we all adjourned to the bone yard, after the final prayer, the funeral director made a few adjustments to Aunt Ruth’s lovely imitation satin gown, which was actually a wrap made of the finest plastic, pulled a leaver and aunty was dropped to her eternal rest in a garbage bag as we stood around grinning like the swamp rats that we were. God Bless America!

 

Eventually even cars were made of plastic. We no longer had “fender benders” because the fenders couldn’t bend. The exquisite leather seats were easy to clean because they were made of, yup . . . PLASTIC! Plastic as cheap, easy to make and nontoxic. Why even your pills could be wrapped in it. What you worried about? It’s nontoxic and non digestible. Comes out just like it goes in. The perfect world, or was it?

 

Beware the Jabberwockie my friend. It comes in a plastic bag. Scientists, concerned with the non-degradable properties of the compound began to check things out and son of a bitch! The Pacific Ocean had apparently been covered with plastic. And nobody noticed. And why should they? Plastic is sterile, right? And eventually you’ll be able to walk all the way to Hawaii in your plastic hiking boots.  Think of the money you’ll save on flying in a plastic plane. Then it was discovered that babies were being born with microplastic bits and pieces in their birth issue of body parts. That’s micro as in the microscopes that were needed to see them. But they were everywhere. From butthole to appetite. A living, breathing doll. Only louder. Then old people had the same thing. And it was in the water, in the food and even in the pollen count. But so what? With all their science and study no one had asked the simple question, what harm will it do.

 

Well, to begin with it will destroy the planet. In the words of George Carlin the planets gonna be fine. Were the problem. Bear in mind there is no definitive study identifying what harm plastic babies do? In fact, if we could do little development, perhaps babies born “pre-diapered” might not be such a terrible thing. They go poop, and then, when they’re done a wrinkled up diaper comes out. Or that mess at the birth. Ronco afterbirth!

 

Anytime you clog up the sink in an ocean you can surmise that this is not going away anytime soon. Oh, there are some companies trying to develop plastic eating amebas. Yeah! That’s just what we need. Like something out of a 1950’s SciFi movie. The Attack of the Alien Weed Eaters! It’s in the water supply, so we switch to bottled water, and it’s in that too! It’s all in women’s make up, but hell, we already knew that. And every sixth grain of rice.

 

It’s the end of the world. Have you noticed lately that most people don’t mind that. It was nuclear annihilation and now it’s Saran Wrap. Wasn’t it cool watching the Mafia wrap some snitch’s head up in that stuff? The world ends every other week. I think our handlers are running out of scare tactics. Remember MonkeyPox? Now they’re calling it M-Pox! Like calling the Clap F-Pox! For us Baby Boomers we were born from a busted rubber and it looks like that’s how we’re gonna go out. Who says there ain’t no God?