According to a paper published by the National Academy of Sciences, as reported in the Washington Post, 9 January 24, tertiary source video here…
When you swill a liter of water from a plastic bottle, whether or not it’s from Fiji or some theoretically pure mountain spring, you are also ingesting a quarter-million tiny bits of plastic–“nanoplastics” one-seventieth the width of a human hair.
***
If you were living in the exact same place you are living …
But it was 100 generations ago …
and you got thirsty …
You would go down to the river and drink.
You would never even dream of doing that now. Some asshole drove their truck into the river. You’d be drinking battery acid. Or some asshole company, maybe even your employer, dumped toxic waste into it, ‘accidentally’ or otherwise, because it was cheaper that way.
We replaced the river with the convenience of water piped right to your house. Progress.
But it tastes weird and it’s chock full of chemicals that they put in it on purpose to kill stuff, and stuff that leached out of the convenient pipes. If you’re living in one of those places where the poors and the blacks live, it might even brain-damage your child for life.
So for twenty dollars a pop you go buy jugs. Plastic jugs, with a label that says “BPA Free!”, whatever the fuck that means, and then you take the jugs to the reverse-osmosis water machine where they charge you fifty cents a gallon … for water. Water that you hope will be better for you than the free water, that isn’t free in the first place, coming out of your taps.
Maybe it is, just maybe. But sorry to say, there are still problems. Many and branching problems, but let’s try to keep it simple. Reverse osmosis strips water of many bad things, and some good things too, like the minerals your body evolved to need from river water. If you drink R/O exclusively you can get diseases of mineral deficiency, like bones that are too soft.
Following the best advice, you add back mineral salts. Electrolytes of sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium. You choose Sea Salt because that sounds really natural and better.
Sea salt is evaporated from ocean water.
The ocean is full of nano-plastics too. Uh-oh. And mercury … god dammit. Yes. All of it ends up in the salt, and then in your sterilized and then re-mineralized perfect water, and then in you.
There’s this special salt though! It’s mined in Utah from ancient sea beds, before All This.
It’s really expensive, but you pay, and you pray.
I’m praying now; that exact prayer.
I’m sure you have your own answers and path. Perhaps you installed a Thing under the sink, and even bought a fluoride filter for your showerhead for the sake of your silky tresses …
None of these things we do, and constantly preoccupy ourselves with, is an actually sane answer to anything.
The very tissues of your loving living body, the body of your beloved spouse, mother, son, life partner, are still crammed full of ungodly crap regardless.
Not just from the water. From the air you breathe, from the industrially produced shirt on your back, from the carpet or linoleum or alleged hard wood on your floor, from the soap and the shampoo and whatever it is you choose to eat because it’s the healthiest, the very most expensively organic thing you can find.
The certified organic rice grown in Texas, for example, in soil that used to grow cotton, which was treated with arsenic to keep it fluffy and white and bug-free. The arsenic is still in the soil. It ends up in the rice, and then in you, alongside far too many carbohydrates–you’re marinating in poisons.
You will need to seek solace in the “health care system” for it eventually, but that is a whole ‘nother plastic-lined can of organically-ranched worms, and I’m trying to stop smoking tangents.
***
Clearly-marked tangent: I’ve been sleeping very well. I credit the magnesium salts. But this night after only four hours I woke to piss (I blame the water) and got back in bed and knew right away it wasn’t going to work, mainly because of a new and very specific anxiety about my health, and feeling as though I might be forced to go back and see those condescending pricks at the north country ‘health care’ or die sooner than I want to–a viciously rational cause for insomnia if there ever was one.
I went to my screen and the video linked above was the first thing I saw.
Something crystallized.
I started writing.
This is my Copium.
It’s obsessively important to me that my writing becomes a small piece of your copium too, but that’s my problem and you don’t have to do anything about it to prove that you love me, or to make me feel better about myself.
It’s not your job. It’s mine. To feel loved. To feel ‘better’.
***
Some scientists are worried about people fallaciously calling Pluto a planet.
Some scientists favor the lab leak theory, while others, much better paid, go on CNN to call the human drug ivermectin ‘horse paste’, and urge you to go get jabbed over and over with the latest lucrative thing, because Science.
Some scientists say we’re living in a whole new geologic era, called the Anthropocene. Beginning in the year 2000, give or take a generation, the Anthropocene is characterized by no part of the planet being unmarked by the scars of human Civilization. There is European soot dusted on the purest Arctic ice, helping it to melt faster. There is plastic in the deep ocean trenches. There is an artificial ring around the planet full of sputnik trash and shiny new star links, one of which is transferring my thoughts to you right now.
Maybe so, or maybe we entered the new era when the first ever agricultural king sat down on the first ever settler throne, o those hundreds of generations ago.
Some people, mostly not scientists, behold this godless tableaux and react to it by calling themselves anarcho-primitivists, An-Prims.
Anarchy is the absence of rulers, nothing more or less … which strikes me as superior to anything we have now, including the corrupted and corporatized sham of democracy we are supposed to cheer for and send our kids (well, I mean their kids naturally) to die for like heroes, and thank you for your service; better you than me or mine, you poor legless homeless mad fentanyl scrub.
Primitivism is harder to define, but as a certified primitivist I would say that it is the theory that drinking from the river was in some nebulous way just better in almost every way.
Most critiques of primitivism take for granted the further assumption that a primitivist must be someone who wants everyone to return to that better way.
This further assumption is false, at least for me.
I have no prescription.
I don’t really believe there is a prescription, short of the cruel medicine of the apocalypse in progress. In that sense you could accuse me of fatalism, or even call me an anarcho-fatalist instead of a mere an-prim.
Armageddon has already occurred. The Cain in each of us has already beaten the Abel in us to death without mercy. The plastic blood is proof of it and we don’t need to wait for the AI to take over or the nukes to fall or Florida to disappear or for the rivers to all run dry.
Imagine there’s no heaven.
Imagine there is no superpower hero in a white robe and sandals coming back to save us.
Imagine that no civilized technology will ride in at the last moment, because the last moment is already behind us, and the technologies are not the solution, but the very beating heart of the problem in the first place.
Imagine us in mid-air, in a driverless electric car …
Floating for a moment between the edge of the cliff behind and above us, on the outskirts of Nagasaki, and the merciless gravity impact down there that begins any random second now.
The poison already lighting up our arteries and our superfine minds, each and every one of us.
Do you want to spend the last floating fleeting moments talking about who will emerge from the football playoffs? Or the mock election in the fall? About who will finally fix the ukraine?
Or …
what?
