The root of all tragedy is plastic

In the town of Monza, Italy, it’s against the law to keep your goldfish in a round goldfish bowl.  The government doesn’t want their fishy friends to develop a skewed perception of reality. Stephen Hawking says that even though a goldfish has a skewed perception of reality, he can still make legitimate scientific observations based on the patterns that he sees.

For example, if a ball rolls straight across the table, it always falls off the table.  The goldfish in a round bowl will see the ball roll in a curvy line before disappearing.  Or, here’s another example:  the round lady with one eye always walks up to the bowl and picks up a round package, and when she does this, food falls on the surface of the water.

The same theory works for people too.  Loads of people with demented perceptions of reality make calculated observations about reality.  Everyone thinks they see cause and effect based on the small portion of the world that they’ve seen.  Like my great grandmother Mabel, and her devout belief that plastic is an abomination.  It’s like a phobia.  Phobias aren’t genetic, they are caused by a series of events that the mind interprets into a sort of neurological allergic reaction of the mind.

This one time,my great grandmother Mabel caught Aunt Dorcas shaving her legs with a plastic razor.

It wasn’t one of those disposable ones like they have today and plastic wasn’t called plastic back then, it was called bakelite after the guy who invented it.  Dr. Bakeland.

This is Dr. Leo Bakeland. He’s the guy that invented plastic.

Because of his evil deed of inventing a way for the unholy beast to take over the world, he was cursed by God.  He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a sanatorium and was buried in Sleepy Hollow.

And because of my Aunt’s evil deed, grandmother Mabel screamed so loud she popped the buttons of her shirt and threw a cast iron skillet clear across the room.  Had she been a baseball player or a sword thrower in a circus, perhaps Aunt Dorcas would have died that day and never married the Mexican Coconut smuggler who was in cahoots with the cartel.

No, she didn’t die.  The skillet smashed into the mirror of the medicine cabinet and shards of broken glass went flying through the air and completely covered Aunt Dorcas.  It took three months to get all the glass out of her skin.  I’ll spare you the details.  Aunt Dorcas loves to tell this story and just the thought of blood makes me want to pass out.

Of course, that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.  That was one of many many plastic incidents in the house, and in all fairness, Aunt Dorcas swears up and down that she thought the razor was made of wood.  But you know, the lady has been know to bend the truth to fit her own conniving plans.  I mean, seriously, if she really was sneaking around, then why didn’t she lock the bathroom door and shave her legs at four o’clock in the morning?  Really.  The woman was shaving her legs in broad daylight with the bathroom door wide open.  Actually, now that I think of it, they didn’t have plumbing or electricity in the house back then, so maybe I need to have someone else besides Aunt Dorcas tell me their version of the story, because now I’m really starting to wonder where all those scars came from.

Great Grandmother Mabel, wasn’t born with a psychotic disorder, and it had nothing to do with a genetic defect or DNA.  She claims that every single misfortune in her life was caused by some sort of plastic.  Coincidence?  She doesn’t think so.  Actually, I’m going to have to say that if I did the calculations, I could come to the same conclusion.  Every single time something bad has happened to me, plastic was involved.  Go figure, maybe there’s something to it.  Who knows.

But you really have to understand that things were quite different back then, when she was born.  There was just nothing made of plastic out there where she was.  That is, there was no plastic until her firstborn son was born.  As a gift, her very own mother gave her a crate of baby bottles.  These bottles had rubber nipples…that were made from the blood of the beast. That’s right, petroleum.  She was told that all the high class mothers were doing it.  She was told that bottles are better.  So she fed her baby with a bottle.

But then something horrible happened.  A few years later, the poor kid got type 1 diabetes, and died.

It was horrible.  For years she would hold onto his little shoes at night and just cry for hours.  Naturally, she wanted to find a reason why it happened.  Her husband was a medicine man, and so was her father in law.  She lived with several people who had been know to cure anything and anyone.  They were considered miracle workers, and none of them could cure this poor little child.  According to the story, she was so utterly devastated by the loss of her child that they almost thought she might commit suicide.  They had never heard such wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Everyone hovered over her at every moment of the day just to make sure that she wouldn’t “do herself in”.  That’s when they all decided that maybe the poor devastated mother needed something to keep her mind offof her deceased child.  So, they brought her the ancient texts.  They had hoped that she would find the meaning of life, and perhaps, something to live for.

Like a maniac, she poured over these ancient writings and learned everything there is to know about life, the universe, and everything.  Deep down inside, she wanted to bring him back, or turn back time, or do something to console herself.  But all she found was a reason why he died.  It was because she stuck a piece of rubber in her kids mouth, and the rubber that she used just happened to have been made from petroleum.  Petroleum is made from oil, and according to legend, oil is the blood of the beast that wants to take over the world and cause chaos and madness.

She swore, from then on, that she would not let anything enter her holy abode that was made from the blood of the beast.  She was on a mission after that to stay the heck away from anything plastic.  Unfortunately, there was another terrible tragedy involving plastic many years later.

One dark and stormy night, when Mercury was in retrograde, a Tupperware salesman (woman, actually), was driving down the road past the mango plantation, when she got a flat tire.   She walked a mile in the pouring rain with two bags of her finest wares and knocked on the door of Great Grandmother Mabel’s house.  Well, her son in law, Bill, answered the door and let the lady in.  She told them all about how she was just coming back from a Tupperware party, and opened her bag to show them the new line of the most fabulous storage containers.  It was like bringing a keg of beer and a vodka still into a Southern Baptist Church.  Great Grandmother Mabel screamed so loud a window broke and rain came gushing down into the living room and the wind blew out all of the candles.  Tears started streaming from the Tupperware lady’s eyes and the poor lady nearly had a heart attack.  Even though she was scared senseless by my great grandmother, she asked to use the phone.  Well, of course she couldn’t call anyone, because they didn’t have a phone.  So naturally, Bill offered to give her a ride on the horse to the nearest gas station whenever it stopped raining.  That’s when Mabel got the broom and used it to push the lady out of the house.  Well, because Bill was such a nice guy he just gave the lady a ride home on his horse in the pouring rain.  He never came back.  They were hit by a truck when they stopped to put the Tupperware lady’s bags in the trunk of her car.

Had it not been for plastic, this never would have happened.

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