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Current mood: scared stiff
Category: Writing and Poetry
“Westerners have, for a long time, discounted the importance of background. The earth herself, which is our most inclusive background, is dealt with summarily as a source of food, metals, water, and profit, while the fact that she is the fundamental agent of all planetary life is blithely ignored.”
—Paula Gunn Allen
“Kochinnenako in Academe” 
ONCE UPON A CURSED TIME, I was struck by the strange fate of bubblegum. I don’t know how or why it first crept into my consciousness. One fine day it was just there -- clinging to the filthy underside of my imagination.
I was probably ten when I first became obsessed with the sight of chewing gum plastered underneath restaurant tables. Whenever I would enter any sort of eatery, I found myself inexplicably immobilized by a tormenting mixture of excitement and disgust—excitement because I love to eat. In particular: bean and cheese burritos. And disgust because the act of sitting down for a meal at any public table grew increasingly unbearable—causing me to unravel, Othello-like. If there happened to be tablecloths draped over the tables, then my anxiety would subside a bit. But like hot sex and true love, tablecloths were few and far between. So, as with most ventures in my life, eating out became an icky-blicky double-edged sword. Nothing, it seems, was ever 100% pleasurable for me. Every good time had to be secretly tainted by some nebulous, free-floating fear that forever threatened my fragile state-of-mind. I couldn’t just walk into Taco Bell, order a bean and cheese burrito and some cinnamon twisties, sit down at the corner booth by the window and rip into my refried joy. There was never such a thing as untainted bliss in my life. There was always some kinda of nasty catch hooked into every would-be good time. And the nasty that hooked me, haunting many potentially wonderful meals: old, stiff, fossilized chewing gum that some weenies passing through stuck underneath my table months, maybe even years earlier.
It's twenty or so years later. I'm a so-called adult now. I'd like to think that I've since ‘recovered’ from my preoccupation with the obscene leftovers of strangers. I had until that awful day when I learned of something far more grotesque—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I'm not going to lie, hearing the initial description made my cervix flip inside out. The GPGP was introduced to the world by Oprah on her 2009 Earth Day special. For those of you who don't know about this environmental atrocity, allow me to paint the horrifying picture: the GPGP is a dirty, drippy, two-times-the-size-of-Texas vortex of trash that has collected in the Pacific Ocean halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii—the same ocean that supplies the seafood we eat and love. (The magnetic currents of the ocean have caused the planet's trash to collect there.)
Not so much a dense carpet-of-trash as I had initially imagined, the Patch resembles more of a gigantic trash soup...all loose and splashy...gurgling with every conceivable piece of floating filth a dirty mind could conjure—plastic bags and bottles bobbing as far as the eye can sea…stuffed animals nobody loves anymore…innumerable shards of soggy paper and disintigrated Styrofoam…old war-torn stilettos...bloated tampons that once plugged the bloody gashes of virgins and tramps…rusty car parts…doll parts...cigarette butts...used rubbers still lined with his fleeting passion...shredded tires...you name it, it’s drifting there. It's almost like, our trash is closing in on us.
Recent estimations have it at approximately 100-feet deep and growing. What’s worse, the marine life that call the North Pacific home are mistaking the debris for food. Scientists and researchers have cracked opened up the rotting carcasses of countless birds and fish strangled in the mess, and found their bellies overflowing with everything from Starbucks cups to lighters. Without a doubt, we've got a great environmental crisis on our hands, and each one of us its perpetrator.
Plastic, humanity’s ‘miracle’ material, is one of the most abundant ingredients in the GPGP. In particular, the raw feedstock of plastic known as polymers or ‘nardles’. Nardles are tiny translucent pebbles hatched in manufacturing plants throughout Texas and Louisiana, and are chemically treated to be hard or soft, elastic or rigid, colorful or colorless, ultraviolet or shatter-resistant. In this form, before factories have melted them into Xerox machines and Frisbees, they make up 10% of the plastic found in the ocean.
 And although our ‘out of sight, out of mind’ raison d'être is easy to employ when faced with this most inconvenient truth, the bitter fact remains—the microscopic byproducts of our waste are polluting our oceans and making their way back to us, completing the karmic circle. This is what happens when tons of plastic doesn’t get recycled, floats down drains and ultimately merges with our oceans which cover 70% of the entire planet. In the end, there's no getting out of this one. What we sow, we reap—and what we don't recycle—we eat. 
In many ways I wish I’d remained oblivious to the Great Patch of our Garbage. The mere knowledge of it makes me wanna commit suicide. Afterall, this whole environmental mess is like suicide on the installment plan anyway. (The polar ice caps are melting because of human pollution and if we don't completely change the way we handle our collective trash, things are gonna get really, really bad for us all. Massive chunks of ice will melt. Tides will rise. Lands will flood. Precious space will vanish right beneath our feet. Remember Hurricane Katrina? Ok.)
But then again, I'm kinda glad I know about it. I’m the kind of person who’d rather know the truth versus wandering through life ignorant to what’s really going on out there. I’d rather know than remain adrift in the oily depths of this toxic dream. So when I first heard about this man-made catastrophe, I found myself flash-dancing back to pre-puberty—to an anxious time when something inside would force me to bend over sideways and look under every slimy Bob’s Big Boy table from here to Key West—me making myself face the ugly truth that was wedged in petrified patches two inches beneath my greasy plate.
 Except this is different. This makes me feel utterly swindled. Fucking heart-split! Staring into the gaping wound of this, our Great Environmental Holocaust, eclipsed even the most profane compulsions of my youth—more ghastly than the old chewing gum or the soggy exhumation of freshly buried pets. For me, seeing graven images of our exquisite Mother being turned into a massive liquid landfill was tantamount to jumping off the Empire State Building and landing on a bike without a seat...to sliding down a 50-foot razor blade and landing in a puddle of Southern Comfort. It was like having my clitoris ripped out by its pink, undulating roots. It was as if every stiff gob of gum I'd ever gagged at the sight of at had dislodged their hardened selves from underneath diner tables within a 1000 mile radius and slinked their way over land and spoiled sea to get to me—cornering me at last in some nasty gas station restroom somewhere.  When they found me there, rat bastard motherfuckers...they took their sweet, sticky time violating me. Hundreds of them! Thousands, maybe. Like a tidal wave they rolled up onto me in a melange of color as I hunched over on the cold, unforgiving can—clutching the guard rail with both hands for dear life. But up they continued to go. Sliming up my inner thighs, still humid from the heat of my strife—up, up, and up inside my perfect storm they rolled. Stuffing every leaky orifice with faint vestiges of peppermint, cinnamon, and strawberry blast—up into my mouth and down my wheezing throat. Plugging my waxy ears tight. Blanketing my pale face as they stretched their now flavorless rubber over my eyes…fading life as I knew it straight to black. With no succor in sight. (Her Help? is heard by no one.) 
“We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
www.GreatGarpagePatch.org
© Copyright, PMS, 2009
4:36 PM
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