Tuesday 28 February 2017

Landfill/Sofa







I aspire to a 'zero waste' lifestyle, but I'm not there yet.  One major obstacle is plastic, a subject on which my mind wandered onto this blog a few posts back.  Where I live in Bury, there's a great vegetable market, though very little of what it sells there seems to be locally produced (local readers please correct me if I'm wrong). When you take 'food miles' into account, as well as, you know, the actual cost, it still seems as if it's better to buy from my local Co-op, just across the road. I'll set aside for now the fact that every single time I shop there they ask me "do I have a Co-op Card?" (no) followed immediately by "are you interested in becoming a member?" (NO) for the sake of convenience (however advantageous corporate loyalty schemes may be, the idea just makes me feel ill) but I also have to balance this against the unsustainable obsession all supermarkets have with wrapping absolutely everything they sell in at least one layer of plastic. 

This annoys me greatly and I've been scrupulously dividing my waste according to Bury Council's recycling stipulations (Bury Council aspire to be a zero waste local authority themselves, which is great, though I don't know yet if that means what they think it means) but this obviously pales into semi-significance when weighed against the fact that recycling is a far from perfect substitute for just not producing waste to begin with.



This is all a mess of hipsterish mental hand-wringing, I suspect, until I can establish more of the actual facts, but in the meantime I have found the following (temporary) solution.




Behold, my bean bag sofas. These were one of the necessary indulgences I had to make when I moved into a totally unfurnished at last year. They're something I've always wanted - that's a lie, of course, I just like the idea, and they're much more portable, not to mention cheaper than more solid forms of furniture - so here they are, as tastefully modelled on a previous occasion by my two approving kittens.



Now, to the point. These bean bag sofas come with the pre-filled inner bags of 'beans' for you to stuff inside. These are adequate, but leave the eventual sofa shape a little more blobby than is really desirable. Thus, an obvious solution presented itself: plastic packaging, when not going into the recycling, goes straight into the sofa. There it will stay, away from the landfills and harm for the foreseeable future. And so I find myself sitting on own my waste. An entirely appropriate metaphor for our situation as human beings, when you think about it.



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Related posts

Sitting on a Landfill (Waiting for the End to Come)
Composting Your Own Hair
Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
Make Sofas Comfortable Again (By Stuffing Them With Ecobricks)

Tuesday is also writing day



My book, which has the working title, 'The Vegan Imperative' is coming along slowly, oh so slowly, but surely, I think.  You may recall a few weeks back I decided that Monday would be my writing day.  No matter what, every Monday I spend some time working on my book.  It's not a difficult promise to keep, vaguely defined as it is (five minutes, after all, counts as "some time") but I'm pleased to say I've managed to do so through January and February.  I have about eight to ten thousand words down, and they're shaping themselves into some kind of order.

But this isn't really enough, so I've decided that from today onwards (happy Pancake Day, if you like that sort of thing) Tuesday is going to be a writing day as well.  Yesterday I got a few paragraphs together explaining the Cambrian explosion (as much to myself as any future reader - evolutionary biology is hardly my area of expertise) and found myself tumbling down the rabbit hole of scientific research into such obscure matters as how and why the oxygen content of the atmosphere facilitated the evolution of eukaryotic life, the 'evolutionary arms race' that comes with the emergence of predation, as well as spending more time than I probably needed to pondering the more esoteric meanings of photosynthesis.  (Can you eat light?)  Writing a book is hard work, especially with a brain as scattered as mine, and with enormous gaps in my knowledge concerning the scientific lines of thought I want to follow, much research is needed.  I suppose if I can explain these things to myself I should be able to explain them to readers, too.

So all this requires more than one day a week.  It will probably require more than two, but for now that's as much as I can realistically afford.  It's snowing outside, and I need to top up my electric meter.


Related posts

Monday is writing day

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Tuesday 7 February 2017

Everyday Things You Don't Really Need At All #1: Washing Up Liquid



I've always had a soft spot for those statistics you hear about how much of your life is occupied with the utterly mundane.  You spend one year of your life sitting on the toilet.  Six months in queues (not including the five months spent 'on hold').  Eleven years watching television.  Five years doing housework.  There's any number of listicles out there to scare and/or inspire you into spending more time doing things you love, always wished you had the time to do, or just doing the things that don't make you long for the sweet release of death.







If you're anything like me, you'll find all this rather amusing.  So I thought it might be interesting (and maybe even practical) to start reporting back on some of my experiments in anti-consumption, by taking a look at everyday things you don't actually need at all.  The things that cost money, rather than time, but which are so often sold to as if they're somehow, miraculously, going to save you both.

First on the list is about as everyday as you can get: washing up liquid.  Washing up liquid is one of those products that illustrates perfectly late-stage capitalism's most enduring fetish: choice.  Let's consider what washing up liquid is for.  Well, it's for washing up.  It's a liquid detergent that makes scrubbing your eating and drinking utensils slightly easier than just hot water alone.  That's it.  That is its entire raison d'être.  Of all the trillions of bottles of washing up liquid even manufactured, not a single one has ever experienced the long dark night of the soul.  It does what it is here to do.  Then it is discarded - perhaps recycled, but quite probably not - or perhaps it finds its way into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic's best hope for any kind of afterlife.

Revelation 21:1
But I digress.  Don't worry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  It's completely harmless and anyway it'll probably just go away on its own.  As plastic tends to do.  Let's think instead about the varieties of washing up liquid.  By way of research for this post, I nipped over the road to my nearest supermarket, a small Co-op, providing four or five aisles worth of everyday essentials.  (It's been rather low on lettuce the last few weeks though, but don't worry about that either - the changing climate almost certainly doesn't have anything to do with, um, climate change).

Four varieties of Fairy liquid are available, along with a cheaper 'own brand' version that could very easily be totally identical for all you're ever going to know (or care).  Fairy is available for £1.69 per 520ml, in "apple orchard", "original lemon" and "platinum", um, flavours...? as well as "original", which comes in bottles 20ml smaller (making it 13p per litre more expensive than the alternative, smellier varieties), and which boasts the scientific breakthrough of now lasting "up to 50% longer", a statistic that has certainly been independently verified by the various washing up liquid watchdogs.  "Original lemon" has a similarly attractive selling point, having "50% more grease cutting power", a fact which again I have no doubt must have passed the scrupulous process of peer review and definitely makes sense.  Fairy's only competitor on this shelf is 'Clean n Fresh', which costs 35p for 500ml and, because it's fucking washing up liquid, is EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME.  I left without buying any.  The choice was just too much for me.  So ends what I like to imagine was the funniest paragraph about washing up liquid that you have ever read.

Of course you'll have had thoughts like this before, as anyone who's ever spent time gawping at the pointless variety available on supermarket shelves has done.  It's just one of those things, isn't it?  Maddening, stupefying, something we've just come to accept as kind of insane, but there it is anyway.  Another blight on our psycho-social landscape, the price we pay for convenience, high employment, and economic growth.  There's room.  There's always room.

I have decided that it's the little battles against this kind of madness that are exactly the ones we should be fighting.  Which brings me to my point.  I've been washing my dishes without washing up liquid now for about four months, and they are as clean as they always were.  There have been no negative consequences.  I haven't died of salmonella, for example, and that's even without the 50% spike in Fairy liquid's already astonishing grease cutting power.  Here's all you need to do:
  1. Soak your dishcloths in warm water with a splash of bleach overnight.  You only need to do this about once or twice a week.  If you don't already have some bleach, don't buy some specially, just do without.
  2. Leave your dishes in the sink to soak in hot water for a while.  Sometimes I add a little a 'vegetable soap' just to ease things along.
  3. Wipe clean with the dishcloth.  You might need to use some steel wool to scrub off anything burnt but again, if you don't already have any, make do.  Leave to dry.
  4. Your dishes are now clean, using items you probably already have anyway, and without spending a penny.
As an added bonus, you now have yourself a sink full of 'grey water', free from any weird chemical soapy scum that you can use for watering plants, a subject on which I'll have more to say another time.

Perhaps this all seems facetious to you.  If so, look at it this way.  How much do you spend on washing up liquid a month?  A year?  Over the course of your life?  Is there really any point?  How many hours of your working life are spent just earning the money to buy washing up liquid, something you objectively, demonstrably do not need?  What else could you do with that money?  These questions matter.  They matter because the immediate moment matters, the simple and the mundane matters, and how much you allow the economic and philosophical systems that are destroying our world to make you a part of their ridiculous game matters.  So stop using washing up liquid.  You've got to start somewhere.

Related posts

Everyday Things You Don't Really Need At All #2: Toothpaste
Sacred Economics
Sitting on a Landfill (Waiting for the End to Come)


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Sunday 5 February 2017

"I have everything I need"


Say these words to yourself, right now: "I have everything I need".  I'm confident that if you're reading them (maybe on your smartphone?) it's probably true.  You have everything you need.

The discipline and joy of living in the moment, however you understand this already clichéd idea, is intimately connected with this one: you have everything you need.  You don't need that phone upgrade.  You don't need that package holiday.  You don't need that new handbag.  Whatever it is, if you think you need it, and it costs money, you almost certainly don't.  You want those things. There's nothing wrong with wanting things, but to remember the difference between that and needing them is essential. Consider the gulf between what you want and what you need.  How wide is it?  Is it worth crossing?  Why?  And how will you know when you've made it?  And then what?

Are you afraid of boredom?  How does boredom make you feel?  Does boredom have to be a negative experience?

Stop asking so many questions!

No.

Do you feel as if you always have to be doing something?  Why?  What happens when you stop doing things?  Do you get bored?  How long does it take you to get bored?  How long can you concentrate on one thing at a time?  Do you sometimes find it difficult to concentrate?  Why?

Say these words to yourself: "I have everything I need".  Even if they're not true, say them anyway.  See where it takes you.





Related posts

Deep Breaths and How to Take Them
The Game of Evil
The Shame of the Game of Evil
Water and Brains
Freedom, Work and Boredom (Some Disparate Thoughts)
Thoughts from an empty room
How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (And Get Away With It)
Marx, Money and Me






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Wednesday 1 February 2017

Deep Breaths and How to Take Them

I'm thinking a lot about breathing this week. What prompted this was my annual asthma review on Monday with a very enthusiastic practice nurse, far more enthusiastically anti-asthma than I've encountered in some years. I've suffered from asthma all my life, so these reviews have become routine, if not an irritation - yeah, I have asthma, it's a chronic condition, treatable but incurable, shit happens, take your inhalers and move on. As such when the nurse asked me if I thought my asthma was "well controlled", I said yes. According to the working medical definition, she told me, no it isn't.

It's good for your ego to come up against the cold, hard truth about yourself every once in a while. Facts don't lie (despite what you may have heard recently from across the pond) and they'll undermine the narrative you may have built about your life at any chance they get. So it was that a quick spirometer test (something less passionate asthma nurses haven't given me before) revealed that I have a "lung age" considerably older than the age of the rest of my body. Turns out I've been taking weaker inhalers than I should have been for years, and probably not even using them properly. Asthma has been wreaking its revenge for my complacency.




Some frantic googling when I got home showed that "lung age" is something misleading of a term. Perhaps it's designed to shock the average non-medically trained patient (hello!) into taking better care of their vital organs. My own personal figure (65) doesn't really tell you I have the lungs of man my dad's age, at least not exactly. Stumbling into some forums I came across COPD sufferers with lung ages in the 140s. Needless to say, these people were not born in the 1870s. Some were younger than I am. Another thing about "lung age" is unlike actual age, it's not linear. My lungs won't necessarily be 70 in five years from now. Hence, new inhalers.

Anyway, enough about me. Let's think about breathing. We all breathe, and we do it without thinking. Perhaps we shouldn't. Perhaps the yoga teachers and mindfulness gurus and compulsive meditators are on to something really important. Focus on your breathing. It's no coincidence that western and eastern spiritual traditions alike have associated breath with the divine. There's just something about a long, deep breath that immediately draws you out of the mundane. It's simple physiology, and it doesn't matter whether you express it metaphysically or not. The deep breath slows you down. It grounds you. Or put more precisely, the inhalation grounds, draws you inward; and the exhalation brings you back again. You feel immediately more alert, more present. A simple boost of oxygen can be all you need, and let's put it in Gurdjieffian terms (why not?) to remember yourself

Remember yourself.


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