Hope(less) Floats

Today's topic is #43. A week's worth of garbage. I think when I wrote that I had just watched a segment on the news in which a reporter elected to carry around in a sack or a bag (can't remember how he was holding it) all of the garbage he generated in a week. I believe his objective was to prove we as a people, as individuals, as consumers and poopers, apparently generate a shit ton of garbage. I think he fully expected to have a Santa-sized load burdening his shoulders like the globe to Atlas come Sunday (unless you deem Sunday the first of the week, to that I then say Saturday), but I'll never know because I only saw him pledge to do it. I don't know what happened in the end, but if he's anything like me with garbage, he fell woefully short of proving his point. If he's a single, petless, childless, miserly, recycling sort such as myself, he would have generated a half a bag at best and been half in the bag for most of said experiment. While I have many flaws for sure, and I know I could use improving when it comes to certain skills - whistling for a cab, brewing coffee, balancing a spoon on my nose, speaking dog - there's one thing I do to the point of near perfection: minimize waste. I do not create a lot of garbage. I recycle religiously. I throw virtually nothing away. I am not a hoarder, though I could possible play one on TV. I have things, many things I suppose more than one innocent observer might suggest I could toss, but I hesitate because where would these items go? From my pile...relocated to another pile. A bigger pile that could be covered in dirt and made into a mountain and then covered in snow and made into a ski resort and then covered by a dome and made into an indoor ski resort. And somewhere in the depths of that pile turned fancy indoor replica of Aspen is my pair of plaid Toughskin cutoffs from 1982, the legs of which are in some other dump turned resort, along with my little league softball trophies. I think I minimize what I toss now because I'm aware of what's been thrown out on my account in the years prior. It leaves me a bit unsettled to imagine all my former stuff idling in some other place or perhaps snatched from the jaws of the garbage truck, salvaged and repurposed by crafty, industrious types with nothing better to do than build a cat jungle out of my discarded carpet, floor lamps and toaster ovens . My basement is not yet full. There's plenty of room in the loft. Things that hang out there might no longer be of use to me (for now), but what harm are they causing, really, by sitting there? The alternative is much worse. From the curb to the truck to the dumpster to a bigger dump to a landfill made larger by me. I can't contribute to that. Not when I know there's also acres upon acres of crap floating in the ocean, to the point of becoming a new continent visited daily by survey ships and zoomed in upon in real time by countless satellite cameras. Apparently, whatever the ocean sucked out of Japan in that tragic tsunami back in March has been burped back up to form a slick of garbage in the middle of the Pacific twice the size of Texas. I don't know about you, but whenever someone mentions the size of Texas (let alone two Texases...or is it Texii?), I fall into a natural state of awe with a twist of panic. Texas is frickin' huge. When I was a kid, we drove across it. And not the fat part, just the panhandle. The Texas panhandle is like 25 Oklahahoma panhandles. I don't even know how they can call it a panhandle. It's more like a cake pan. Driving across the Texas panhandle was the closest thing I came to losing it as a small child. As great as I am with garbage, I am equally cool-headed and was even moreso in my youth. Enter the Texas panhandle. I 'bout lost my mind. Endless (and when I say endless I don't mean it hyperbolically, I mean it quite literally), endless brown split by pavement, dusted by the occasional tumbleweed, weighted by a silence so blank I could hear the air in my lungs. I've never seen so much...nothingness. So I take the vastness of that and superimpose it over the beautiful blue waters about a year west of Hawaii, fill it with mangled Hondas, appliances, furniture, sushi bars, boats, planes, trains and the remains of thousands upon thousands of homes built decades ago and I wonder. I wonder how that Native American who teared up in commercials long gone would feel now knowing that a two times Texas monstrosity is creeping toward the shores of California. I wonder if we should make it a country, assign it a leader, populate it with garbage artists and junkyard dogs. I wonder if we can stand on it. I wonder if we can stop it. Part of me wants to see it in person. At least I know I won't be stuck in a Plymouth driving across it...