179 the little things in life
It's the little things in life. We may not be able to breath, but thankfully Danny Kennedy can still sing, and he's doing it every Friday at 2pm PST. (The link is to yesterday's performance.)
And then what?
Yesterday at Safeway I was greeted by these new, compostable bags for your veggies. And I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed. Why? Because the old plastic bags are pretty good for picking up dog shit.
Twenty years ago, I washed out plastic bags and reused them. (I still do, but...) Then dogs came into my life, and while I find the idea of wrapping each dog turd on Earth in plastic forever and ever a really bad idea, picking up your dog's crap is the law, and a plastic bag was the most convenient way of doing it. (Pooper scoopers are great, but not very portable.)
So plastic bags took on a different currency in my life.
Now, I knew those bags weren't going to get recycled, but what about the rest of our plastic?
That's not getting recycled, either. (San Francisco actually has one of the most comprehensive recycling programs around, and still, recently for a couple years, all of our recycling was being thrown away... Because it was easier for the garbage people to empty our blue bin into the black one and haul only one up the fifteen stairs from the basement to the street.)
But it turns out there's a bigger problem than inconvenience. It turns out, there was never any plan to recycle all that plastic with that triangle of arrows on the back. They're just there to give you false hope.
Because money.
Years ago when we were escalating the oil wars in the middle east, I remember someone saying that history would not look kindly upon our oil use. Why would we burn such a valuable commodity, they asked, when we could use it to make plastic?
So, yeah, time to get used to scooping with compostable bags. Rad!
(And that right there is the difference between personal choice and systemic change.)
The long and short is, fire is natural. Human behavior isn't.
We don't need to stop fires, we need to stop people.
As recently as the 1950s, the city was doing controlled burns on our grassy hilltops.
But what has happened? Well, a quarter billion dollar aviation racket is part of it.
Crisis capitalism strikes again.
So let's see, we've got June Gloom, Fogust, and now, Smoketember? Choketober?
Now that we've been stuck in this coronavirus spiral for a while, with a few states that seem to take it seriously, and a bunch that don't pretty much ruining all of our effort, it seems clear that we're going to be living in the danger zone for a while.
Which brings around the question of, how are people catching Covid-19 in the US right now?
Early on, it was largely in nursing homes. Then churches and workplaces. Then it was family gatherings.
It's still those things, but it turns out bars and restaurants are a growing factor.
While I am all for outdoor dining, and really excited for the days when dinner theater will return, I have also been joking about how sitting on the sidewalk with a beer doesn't make you immune.
Also, neither does visiting a sick relative.
Ah, blue collar swagger...
Speaking of employment, the purple line below represents the US unemployment rate. You can see, it spiked in the spring.
The red line is Germany, where the death rate from Covid is 50x less than here. That's the difference between a coordinated national strategy, and us. Feeling great yet?
And finally...
The past couple years, I've been thinking about what to do next. I'm still not sure, there are a few ideas still percolating, plus whatever life throws at me.
Most of the current ideas require something, something, to get going. And I've been wondering what that something is, and how I'm going to connect with it.
In the meantime, these two magazines showed up on our kitchen table at the same time.
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