The birds and bees in Kuwait are ignorant of snow falling on other continents. How could such knowledge possibly affect them, and, really, should they care? The birds of Kuwait are busy doing what they do best; nesting.
As I walked from the parking lot to my office building the other day I saw a modest brown sparrow bobbing between car tires, carrying a single, dried palm blade in her beak. The clack of my shoes sent her into the air, fleeing in awkward busts with the narrow leaf tagging along. Life, for this bird, is not unrelenting text messages, guiltily avoided gym sessions and financial worries; it is a simple mission, repeated year after year.
A few days later, driving to work, I saw another bird gathering materials to build a better nest as I slowed to roll over a set of speed bumps. She bounced and pecked, gathering the ribbon remains of a cassette tape before flying over the hood of my car. The tape flickered like a string from an Autobot’s kite.
I imagined speckled bird eggs hatched onto a bed of cassette tape ribbon and other bits of modern waste. Paper napkins might make a nice nest lining and the recycled-paper-brown type would be nature-camouflaged. Cigarette butts could act as lightweight filler for mud dauber’s adobe nests. Innovative and avant garde architects hype the genius of building with “found materials.” Perhaps a little bird told them where to look.
Bothered hippies see the downfall of the planet in a cassette ribbon bird’s nest, but I think they’re missing the lesson here. Take the human example of computers: sure, they may very well lead downfall of humanity, but imagine of all the other possible uses for such equipment, post apocalypse.
Cannibalized laptops could provide keyboard lettering for store names or residences. People would either fight over the A’s E’s and R’s or get creative combining the leftovers of X’s, Q’s, V’s and J’s. I see bicycle paths of flat screen monitors and stairs made of CPU's. Pagers will still be useless, but the nice artist-type woman living in the water bottle house next door might make a hobby of decorating them as Christmas tree ornaments.
The little bird with the cassette tape ribbon reminded me of a stand-up routine by the late George Carlin when he claimed, with all effing certainty, that "the earth will be fine."
"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...a**hole."
1 comment:
cool blog ... i like the post 'you're doing it wrong'
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