Just one thing has stuck with me in the 22 years since the movie Sex, Lies & Videotape came out—and it’s not the sex, the lies or the videotape. In fact, I don’t even remember any of those details. What still resonates with me is the opening monologue about garbage, by the character played by Andie MacDowell.
She’s upset about all the garbage in the world. Where it goes, how much room it’s taking up, the sustainability of an environmental model that pits an ever-growing human population casting off an endless supply of trash against a beleaguered and finite planet.
I’ve been laid up at home for the past several days with a touch of the flu or mono or something. A virus of some sort that zapped me of all energy and appetite for the first two or three of those days but is lifting now. I’ve done a lot of sleeping, some reading, much struggling to reach a comfortable body temperature as I’ve fluctuated from chilly to hot. I’ve also watched a fair amount of TV, including much coverage of the horrific destruction in Japan caused by the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
That’s been the biggest and most graphic tragedy in the news—it’s hard to top the leveling of entire prefectures, the loss of more than 10,000 lives and the real potential for nuclear disaster—but, as always, it’s a grudge match between Mother Nature and Man. We’ll see your tsunami and give you Libya. There also was a brutal crime in typically safe downtown Bethesda the other night, in which two female employees were raped and beaten, and one killed, inside a yoga studio.
None of these things—garbage, natural disaster, nuclear peril, armed conflict, loosed pathologies—are linked, yet they all feel of a piece to me. Especially from where I’ve been laying the last few days, absent most of the distractions of workaday life. In the eerie calm of the house, where I’ve been alone much of the time with a sleeping dog and cat while Lynn’s been out and about in the world, I’ve felt more than my usual sense that It’s All Closing In. Have I mentioned that I’ve been reading newspaper stories and op-ed pieces about looming global food and water shortages?
The debt crisis? Oh yeah, that, too.
How much more can the Earth stand? How long till it all reaches us, rattles our bedsheets, rouses our pets? What comes first, the tornado or the knife?
When the virus was at its height I was sleeping through everything. The darkest news images were no match for overwhelming torpor. But when I turned out the lights last night, I retained for a troubling time the image of that hammerhead of water propelling fleets of vehicles and matchstick remnants of cities across northern Japan. And the explosions at the power plants. The experts say that even in a worst-case scenario, there’s little threat of nuclear contamination in the United States. Ah, but that’s this time, from this disaster, in that country, isn’t it?
The one thing I'll miss as I reenter the world is the instant sleep my illness brought. But laying around the house all day is boring and unproductive. And the worst thing is, it can make you feel like a sitting duck.
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