The Norton Anthology of Turkish Doggerel

This past week I saved every scrap of plastic that I used. In the end, it came to about a pound. Even though I try to avoid processed food, don't drink a lot of soft drinks, purchase glass containers whenever I can, etc. & ad nauseum, still it came to about a pound of plastic, most of which is non-recyclable. A pound. For just one week. Over the last couple of years, my plastic consumption has dropped dramatically, so I can only wonder in horror at how much waste plastic I've produced in my -1 years on Earth. Let's be absurdist and kind and say a bare minimum of 2,310 pounds (1 lb. x 2,310 weeks). The truth is probably twenty or thirty times that. All by myself. Just me. 2,310 pounds of plastic. And most of it's still out there somewhere, and most of it will still be out there, slowly decaying, releasing toxins into the soil and water and air, decades and centuries after my death. It's appalling. Imagine that absurdly low sum multiplied times the population of America (presently 300 million ), the population of the world (currently 6.5 billion ). Consider: Plastic water bottles may take 1,000 years to degrade. And 9 out of every 10 water bottles end up as garbage or litter. 30 million per day. Over a year. 1.65 billion plastic water bottles. And a thousand years. And that's just the plastic water bottles. Okay, enough of that.

Yesterday, I had the rather nasty realization that I have only three weeks remaining to get all the editing and rewrites done on Daughter of Hounds in order to meet my May 15th deadline. And I haven't even begun. Between the digest and the trouble with the cover copy and proofreading Alabaster and getting the "Highway 97" chapbook done, I've let three weeks slip past. Half that time I had to get this thing done. The next three weeks are going to be brutal, especially given that I need to get the next issue of the digest written and out in that same period of time.

Last night, we watched Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare (2004) on Sundance, which documents the devastation of Lake Tanzania following the introduction of a single exotic species, the Nile Perch (Lates niloticus). Sauper's film focuses primarily on the effect the disaster has had on the human inhabitants of Tanzania, and it is horrifying, and it should be seen.

Okay. I have to make this day productive, one way or another.