Paper or Plastic?

Here I go, in my pepaw-on-the-porch voice:

I remember when food stamps were actually stamps. And by stamps, I mean perforated pieces of paper you tear out of a book, not stickers you peel off a coated backing. As a teenager, I was a grocery store checker, and people would pay with these stamps, which were a little bit dollar bill-like, only in non-green colors: ones were rust, fives were purple. If the total came out to a non-even number, I’d give back regular old change. People who were smart and diligent and wanted to buy something that wasn’t food—generally drugs or alcohol—would return time after time, paying for twenty-five-cent packs of gum until they’d collected enough change to buy what it was they really wanted.

It was a pretty good scam. Back when scams were still somewhat possible, before everything became plastic. Like, literally, everything. It’s how we prove ourselves now.

And yes, plastic existed when I was a teenager. Plastic bags were very popular. And those bags are still out there somewhere, I promise you, and always will be, no matter how much we wish they never were.

But food stamps, they were just stamps. They were paper, they had leeway, they were ephemeral. Who knows where they might have ended up?

All my life, I’ve heard whispers of a national ID card. Just when I think it’s been long enough—that the rumors were paranoiac, that it’s a scheme that’s impossible to implement, that there are other, even more sinister ambitions to preoccupy the powers that be (indefinite detention, internet censorship)—just when it seems like something not worth worrying about, it rears its head again. The Real ID Act of 2005 required state IDs to be in accord with standards set forth by the Department of Homeland Security (The ACLU—who really seems to have their hands full these days—explains why this is a bad idea). The act has met with widespread resistance from the states, and its future is currently in question. In a recent debate, however, Mitt Romney endorsed a national ID program as a solution to the “threat” of illegal immigration.

If you’re going to exist in America, Romney insists, you’d better fucking exist.

Anyways, those plastic bags? They’re still around. I probably have a pound of them under my sink.

Just over four years ago, the city of San Francisco made plastic bags illegal. Large grocery stores are prohibited from using them. The city council’s reasoning was that not only were the bags clogging SF’s storm drains and taking up landfill space, they had also gathered together to create an enormous oceanic clot of plastic—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Some reports estimate the size of this trash vortex as being up to twice the size of the continental US.

This shit is not going away. This shit is only getting bigger. It’s our shadow, this shit, only it’s real. How long before it taps us on our coastal shoulder?

When you walk out of a store and the security guard sees that white flash of plastic, you can feel secure. You’ll be okay; no one’s going to keep you from leaving with your groceries. You’re proving yourself with plastic.

Receipts? Receipts disintegrate, receipts just blow away. Think of how well—and how permanently—we can prove ourselves once everything we’ve bought is contained on a plastic card. Think of how crime rates will plummet then, how every last scam will be scanned into oblivion. It is only then that we will truly exist, once we can track each and every item we’ve ever removed from the shelf. It is only then we will live forever.

I live in Oakland, a city that attempted to ban plastic bags in 2007, and was forced to reverse its ordinance when plastic bag manufacturers threatened a lawsuit.

I step outside to get some air. I sink into my pepaw chair, which is a rocker. A plastic bag floats by, and it’s beautiful, something we’ve learned from American Beauty. A plastic bag floats by, and though we cannot catch it, we don’t panic.

We’re safe here on our porch, as long as we don’t need to eat. As long as we never leave again, here on our porch we have nothing to prove. 

Blue Santa

I’ve grown used to spending Christmas alone. There’s something therapeutic about it, and I’ve learned to really embrace the lows. I’m not looking for pity; I enjoy this way of celebrating. I’ve cultivated my own family-unfriendly rituals, stockpiling frozen pizzas and bottles of wine. Sometimes I join my friend Janelle for her Christmas-day tradition of seeing the shittiest movie in the theaters (Yogi Bear: The Movie; Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel). These are some pretty consumerist traditions—I won’t pretend otherwise. Yet there’s something weirdly purging about such solitary, small-scale binges. By the time the holiday’s over, I feel refreshed.

This year, I caved for a family Christmas. My boyfriend has a generous, welcoming family who lives in suburban SoCal and who really embodies the Yuletide spirit. They’ve invited me to join them in the past, and I’ve turned them down in favor of my usual solo Christmas. This year, though, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s about presents.

I knew this, of course. I was a child in an American middle-class family, and spent a lot of time circling things in the Sears catalog. I watch TV, I see the wish-list fervor, I see the reports of injuries and mania that ensue in the rush of the holiday sales. I love to get gifts, myself, and while I could really take or leave Shopping, I like giving gifts, too. But, goddamn, the presents.

We spent a lot of time opening gifts. I mean, a lot of time, to the point where we were long past the point of feeling loved, where we weren’t getting things we needed anymore, but rather bracelet after bracelet, cologne after bottle of cologne, reindeer after nutcracker after angel. Because Santa and the gang were going gangbusters, Christmasland was out in full force (a kitsch that seems so cliché it’s not even kitsch): Caroling snowman families. Miniature ragtag pageants. Santa-capped puppies. Angler elves with baubles on the ends of their poles.

On the drive back to northern California, we made a stop at a thrift store, where all the holiday trinkets had been crowded onto a half-off table. In among the polar bears and wise men and sugarplum snowglobes, sat a holi-deity like none I’d ever seen. It was a Santa, not a Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas, but that twinkly-eyed, cotton-bearded type who was first drummed up by Clement Clark Moore. He had the black boots, the fur-trimmed jacket drawn close to his potbelly by a shiny belt. He looked jolly. But here’s the kicker: rather than red, he was dressed head to toe in blue. Blue Santa. I felt like I’d discovered some undocumented species of bug.

The variety of consumer goods is just that great.

Has the actualization of human desires become so perfected, that the diversity of trinkets has surpassed that of nature? Meanwhile, the number of plant and animal species that disappear increases each year. We sit around a tree, a dead evergreen—always—an evergreen that slowly sheds its needles. Perhaps someone hands us a gift-bagged ornament: a giraffe, the evolutionary marvel of its neck bedecked with twinkling lights. The giraffe, in all its evolutionary wonder, has somehow become entangled as it reaches for that star at the top of the tree.

And like that giraffe, with our everlasting plastic and our distant nations full of barely existing slaves, we too, reach for the star, or stars rather, until Christmas becomes about seeing how many shiny things we can hold in our hands. And once we have too many to keep track of, we panic.

We are panicking, right? We just don’t want to say so for fear of ruining Christmas?

And that’s why I like to spend the day alone. At least when I’m alone, I can create a psychic cap. There are only so many bottles of wine I can drink without dying, only so many pizzas I can fit in the freezer. There are only so many classic cartoon characters they can convert into CGI blockbusters, right? Only so many sequels they can squeeze out of each before one loses money.

And Santa—that most generous of spirits—Santa can only give so much before he drains himself blue.