I am disgusted

A little bit.  Yesterday, I was extremely disgusted.  But with any luck, by tomorrow I'll feel better.  In no particular order, I am disgusted with myself, with my household, and with western society in general.  And it's over such a stupid little thing:  fake plastic greenery. But I'll tell you, if seen the right way, fake plastic greenery is the canary in the coal mine in the collapse of western civilization.


Let me explain. As part of our de-cluttering operation here on the old homestead, one of the things I needed to do was to bring a ladder into the house, climb up, and remove all the decorative stuff from our plant shelves, which sit about 12 feet up.  They run across our living room and bedroom, as they do in most of the tract houses built after 1980 in the United States.  These shelves are ridiculous and have gotten more so with the advent of so-called "cathedral" ceilings popular in houses being built today.  You'll spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars heating up the extra 2,000 square feet of living space, which in any other house would comprise a SECOND FLOOR, where people could live.  Instead we heat and cool the air near 15 feet up just because...we can?  That's disgusting too, but I digress.   Today's rant is about the fake plastic greenery which inhabits the space no one lives in, 12 feet up. 


My personal and household disgust comes from what I found up there when I climbed up to retrieve and remove everything.  It was absolutely filthy.  And the worst filth (which I was actually forced to move, blowing up huge clouds of dust whenever I did it) was on the stupid plastic plants I had up there, in their decorative wicker baskets.  


Let me tell you something I realized at that moment:  Good design never includes plastic plants.  Carrying those plants down and hosing the dirt and dust off them out in the backyard made me realize that.  They don't look real, in fact they look tacky.  But when someone's built your house with approximately 60 square feet of flat space 12 feet up, you have little choice than to find things to fill in that space, if only that there's not an echo in your house when you speak.


And so I'm disgusted with myself for letting things get that bad up there (especially the plastic plants), and disgusted with my family because I also found about 40 rubber bands up there in various stages of decomposition. (Did you know rubber bands actually do decompose?  I do now!)  Of course they were shot up there by the kids, and were never retrieved because who in the hell is going to climb up to do that?


But I'm also disgusted with western civilization, because we have so much excess that we've actually constructed high-up shelving -- not to store goods or even make a sleeping space which is warm in winter -- but simply to hold useless objects we don't love, don't use, and don't ever need to retrieve.  And if there was ever a useless object no one loves, no one uses, and no one wants to retrieve and clean, it's fake plastic greenery.


A fake plant or two in a spot where you'd like a houseplant but know the light's not good enough for growth and health?  OK.  I get that.  But  a wasted 60 square feet of space up against the ceiling which needs filling in with something that looks alive, but isn't, just is not for me anymore.


Give me lower ceilings and bare shelves, if necessary.  The green plastic is heading to the thrift store.  I feel freer already, and as soon as my lungs clear out from all the plastic-plant spore dust I inhaled, I'm sure I'll stop coughing, too.