The world of plastic

[Dave Monroe]

Friday, July 04, 2008
The world of plastic

Here are a few plastic things I put together.

I had fond memories of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which has a
lot of references to the plastics industry, until I re-read it
recently.  Pynchon produces some mind-bending nuggets you won't find
anywhere else, but you have to pick them out of hundreds of pages of
overindulgence and forced mystification.  The chief attraction is
witnessing his mind at work, making connections like it was plugged
into the Internet -- a few decades before the Internet existed.

And that brings me back to plastic.  It comes from oil, which comes
from dead dinosaurs and mosquitoes, and sunflowers and saber-toothed
tigers drowned in tar pits.

In the early days of the Oil Age, long before computers and
nano-technology, chemists were stringing molecules together to make
plastics.  The birth of plastic was the birth of consumerism, and for
the first time the masses could afford to surround themselves with
piles of manufactured junk and taste an emptiness previously reserved
for aristocracy.


And the most mind-bending part is: add atoms to a molecule in one way
and you get something good for toothbrush bristle or for lubricating
your car; add atoms in another way and you get things that lubricate
the mind, like LSD or an antidepressant.

As much as we hate plastic -- non-biodegradable, synthetic to the
touch and eye -- we live in its world.  Unless someone's reading this
to you, you're looking at plastic right now.

We've shaken off the solid world of rocks and dirt, wrapped ourselves
in plastic and blasted off for space.  I'm not a religious person,
but: plastic is just a stage in the shedding of physical form, as the
life-force we represent seeks to control its destiny across infinity.

I would guess it's our imperative to continue shedding these forms,
break free of physicality, take flight, and merge with the light.




http://www.restlus.com/2008/07/world-of-plastic.html