08/30/2002 Archived Entry: "ALL THE STUFF IN THE WORLD"

I just had a disturbing thought.

You know those shows on the Discovery Channel and PBS and stuff--science kind of shows, you know, where they talk about the human body or cars or the Space Shuttle or whatever, and there's always some kind of stuff-to-distance or stuff-to-weight comparison made, like, "The small intestine, if uncoiled and laid flat, would stretch nearly sixty feet!" or "The Space Shuttle contains nearly thirty miles of wire and cables!" or "The Chicken McNugget plant produces nearly one thousand tons of McNuggets per day!" or "If the total amount of money in circulation was collected and stacked, the bills would form a stack tall enough to reach to the moon and then halfway back to the earth!"

Like, where the hell IS all of this stuff?! It seems that if we have that much stuff all around us--enough hamburgers are consumed each year in America to circle the globe six times--that we should be buried in STUFF. Yet, somehow, miraculously, I can go outside without drowning in a gigantic whirlpool of the forty billion gallons of Wesson cooking oil produced annually, or being ensnared by the three thousand miles of optical fiber milled out each year.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?! WHY ARE WE NOT DEAD?! AAA!!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!

I worry about these kinds of things.

[Previous entry: "Outlook"] [Return to archive...] [Next entry: "It's Friday night--do you know where the kids are?"]