This weekend I did some "spring cleaning" and as a result, I threw away probably close to 35 LBS of garbage that I had accumulated over the past 5 years of living here. The next day, I took my old computer monitor to be "recycled." The monitor recycle place was a tiny computer store in an industrial part of town. I walked in and there was no one there, so I made some noise with my throat and set the monitor down as loud as I could hoping someone would pay attention to me. I could see straight through to the back of the store and in the back loading bay, there were old CRT monitors piled past the cieling. Five truckloads. Later when i called my friend to tell him about that, he said, "Yeah, our largest export is garbage. We just ship everything with lead and mercury out of the country. The non-biodegradable styrofoam stays here in a landfill, or we probably send it to Canada."
It made me think of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the one where Superman collects all the nuclear weapons in the world and then throws them into the Sun to destory them forever(redundant). But Lex Luthor places an evil Superman embryo-egg-thing on one of the weapons so when it hits the sun evil Superman is borne(goddamn right 'borne' with an 'e').
This of course reminded me of all the reports of "space junk" that we send into space. Satellites that just stop working and then drift into the outer rims of our universe. Space Junk sounds like a really horrible thing that kids from Berkeley should be protesting about, except the only missing piece of information is that we don't know how big the universe is. It could be like dropping a piece of sand somewhere in Montana. Or it could be like dropping a boulder in a kid's sandbox. Or perhaps our universe is some sort of inverted torus knot and eventually if something flies out of our galaxy, it will come sailing back from the other side.
Because we have no grasp mentally or physically as to how big the universe is, (if it is indeed singular) we can't ever feel small or helpless or insignificant. Since there are no boundaries, no scale, we have no way of knowing if we are the big, ultimate hairless monkeys in space, or if the light-matter-beasts of Upsilon-Q7, with their light refracting skin(invisibility) and telekinetic powers(telekinesis) are in fact, the big kahunas we should welcome with tribute and sacrificial offerings.
Either way, I hope that the Comcast satellite that is sailing past Jupiter doesn't mutate into an evil Superman, because we don't have a good Superman to stop him.
And that movie was ultra-lame.
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