Gimmie a Spoonful...

 The big fear among local residents along Surfside Beach was that after the recent Jeep Weekend participants in that event would leave mounds of trash. It didn't happen, at least not where we were and seemed that most people packed the trash out. There was a good bit of wash up trash Plastic stuff and coming from I don't know where, down the Brazos River, off passing ships or from foreign shores bourn by the ocean tides and currents. 

The original use of these various bits had been pounded to an unrecognizable state by waves and sand. I'm a pretty smart guy, my momma told me, I've read a lot of books, had a couple of successful careers, got a college degree and played in bands where I broke a bunch of guitar stands but even the most anti education non vaxer who swims in sewage will tell you that plastics in the environment are bad. A recent NYT article is one of many that alerts us to the dangers and this Smithsonian article says that the human brain may contain a plastic spoon's weight of these man made nanoparticles. 

It was so handy that to illustrate my point I found this plastic spoon washed up at my recent beach camp.  Always nice not to have to stage a photo or use AI.  

This barrel which was clear and looked to be full of water washed up one day and the next morning due to only having one tide a day so not much water exchange and it was still there. . 

About 15 minutes after I made the photo a Brazos County clean up crew showed and while two guys loaded the barrel a third picked up the bigger hunks of stuff washed ashore around the perimeter of the truck and tossed it in the trailer. A hit the high spots clean up and better than nothing.   

This looks all the world like a jug of urine which brings to mind a car trip I recently made with a friend who carried a jug for just such purposes. As far as I know he is a recycle and reuse type and wouldn't throw his jug in the ocean. I don't know what he does with the piss

On the right note the blue top off a plastic container. Literally hundreds of these wash up. I emptied a plastic jug this morning and put it in the recycle box and tossed the cap in the landfill trash. Good or bad?  

Once when I worked in a nursing home I often gait trained the patients down the hallways which each had a glass exit door at the end. Out one door I could see a plastic grocery bag hung high in the branches of a tree. On a flier attached to the door I wrote in very small letters the date I first spotted that bag so I could monitor how long it hung there each time I walked the hall and how long it took for wind and weather to shred it into nanoparticles so the neighborhood could get it's dose. I moved on before the experiment was complete.

I think there's something there in that spoonful in the brain story. Maybe a poem, a song, a sci-fi story about how shady actors learn to embed behavior altering drugs in plastic which then turn to nanoparticles and are ingested by an unsuspecting population. Oh, wait a minute, we have people thinking stuff like that already.