Life in plastic: is it fantastic?

Your second weekly cleaning tip 🧼

Most bags here just have other bags in them;
The bag under your counter where you keep
The plastic bags you got when you forgot 
Your tote. These ones will be illegal soon

(Imagine the lost good Canadian jobs).
Inside your suitcase, ten months of the year 
Another suitcase nests, inside of which
One more, a little carryon, the three 

Little nesting dolls: potential practicality—
For three weeks of the year they do their job,
Three more, they wait to be unpacked,
The rest, they decorate your bookshelf house.

I bought these bags to keep my objects in,
But now I rent a storage room for them.

Content

This is Marijke’s client’s cat. I hope they don’t object to me posting a photo of it. It is in one of the insulated bags Marijke uses for grocery shopping for her business. 

Last week I sent you a maxim about how many things you ought to have. This week is about something you definitely have too much of.

The poem is clearly about how many bags we have. It’s a pretty literal poem, but I suppose the bags are also a symbol for like, “consumer culture.” I genuinely think, though, that the literal bags are worse than late-capitalism. I think that terminal capitalism should be a symbol for how many bags we have in our homes, because the actual bag problem is the real existential threat.

There is nothing worse than gigantic ball of bags, bursting from the seams of your sink counter. It is so engorged that it has started to tip the little recycling bin over, spilling beer over the painted particle board which, you know, is eagerly absorbing the scent.

And worse is knowing that this giant bin of plastic bags was generated while an equally annoying nest of tote bags spawned in the hall closet. These bags put the “nest” in the poem’s “Little nesting dolls”—not so charming after all. 

I did genuinely have 3 suitcases nested like those dolls, though, for about two years. I moved home to Canada from England at the beginning of c0v1d. Marijke had bought me a large, orange, Amazon Basics suitcase. It primarily carried books—I brought home perhaps 75; we left about a hundred more. It was sheer lunacy to have acquired so many within the short fourteen months we lived there… but I worked in a bookstore, so at least our addiction was 40% off. 

Our neighbours loved receiving the books, though, as we prepared to high tail it out of town. If I’m not mistaken some of them left notes to us—or, I think, even told Marijke—that it was really comforting to receive them, just when it seemed like the world was going to shit. I hope my old neighbours are safe and well, and, postc0v1d, have just as terrible a book addiction as I.

So yes, for two years, the giant suitcase, and then a medium sized suitcase, and then a like carryon sized one nested in my in laws’ basement. I think actually they are all currently in use though… so, progress. 

Context

I honestly think no plastic bags is fine. Plastic bag ban ok with me. It’s not really necessary to have plastic packaging once you get the groceries out of the store. The goods have already done the toughest part of their journey (perhaps warranting some plastic for hygiene and protection) and just need to ride in the back seat of the car.

If you forget your tote bag you can buy a new one or just carry your groceries by hand. New tote bags should be ten bucks: ten bucks every time will teach you to remember your tote, fast.

For an economic argument, I think that production should shift from making tons of shitty plastic bags to making fewer high quality containers, and optimizing last-mile delivery. Same amount of economic activity, fewer horrible bags spilling my dishwasher pucks into a beer puddle.