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 dandelions, and saber-toothed tigers drowned in tar pits.

Long before computers and nano-technology, chemists were arranging molecules 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: move atoms around one way and you get something good for lubricating your car; move them another way and you get something to 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.  You're most likely 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 (and I hope my mystifying is not too forced), but I'd guess plastic is just an early stage in the process of controlling then shedding physical form, as the life-force we represent seeks to outlive this puny universe -- to break free, take flight, and merge with the light.