Driving to work this morning, sipping my Grande Cinnamon Dolce Latte that I had purchased at the drive through Starbucks, I thought about my carbon footprint. The distraction caused my coffee to spill down the front of my shirt as the car in front of me hurriedly put on his brakes, and I slammed too hard on my own.
During lunch I drove down the road from where I work, to purchase a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. I casually discarded the plastic sandwich wrapper onto the passenger side floor of my car, a floor that had grown into a piled mess of empty soda cans, empty cigarette packaging and a variety of colorful plastic food wrappers.
After work I stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up some trash bags, an air filter for the furnace, and a Blue-Ray movie that I had been anticipating. Pulling into my driveway I thought about the items that I had purchased, and how neatly they were wrapped in their own protective layer of plastic.
That evening I went to put the trash out onto the curb for morning pickup, and I realized that I had packaged up a very accurate story of my day. It was then that I saw it, gazing out at me through the forest of plastic packaging and discarded food containers. The monster did not threaten me, instead it told me a story, it’s timeline of waste lay between us, describing the daily routine of the beast in eerie detail.
I paused to consider the destination of this monster, as well as it’s story, a piled library, cleverly hidden from view, holding volumes written over the course of many monstrous lifetimes. Disgustedly, I turned my apathetic, blind eyes away from the fiend as it was taken conveniently out of sight, consequently out of mind.
unwrap... consume…discard…