My Water Bottle

Just yesterday I was walking with a friend through a sporting good store, looking for her panacea in a black hoodie, and as we passed the metal water bottles, I said, "the only thing about this project that I'm doing is that it's making me a little nutty -- last week I bought my kids these bottles -- I'm getting paranoid about our plastic ones."

Today, a reporter/ mommy writer for the New York Times seems to have read my mind, and offered me my very own article! It's always a big relief -- to find a reporter who is actually obsessing over the same question looping over and over in your mind, who then goes out and does all the work for you. And if they have the resources of a newspaper behind them, and that newspaper, all the better!

By ALINA TUGEND

Published: January 5, 2008

I HAVE the usual New Year’s resolutions — exercise more, lose weight, be a nicer person. I also hope to find out if I am inadvertently poisoning my children...

Tugend, in complete accordance with my own family, has been both trying to cut down on waste and to keep a handy supply of water available to herself and her kids... but as the stories of oil-based plastics leaching toxins have been gaining momentum, it seems to be harder and harder to know if that's really such a good idea.

The Minnesota Daily reported last year:
About three years ago a researcher at Case Western Reserve University noticed an increase in genetic defects in mice when she cleaned their polycarbonate cages with a harsh detergent. The polycarbonate leached a chemical called bisphenol A, a known component of the material, and supposedly caused chromosomal defects in the lab mice.

I recommend today's Times article highly, though basically I didn't learn anything new -- but in part because I've been following this story for a while. I noticed in October that Patagonia had stopped selling Naglene -- that concerned me a lot. Canada's largest outdoor equipment chain also pulled plastic water bottles.

You can start feeling a little nutty too -- while I just invested in metal bottles, they are replacing 6 plastic ones I bought just 6 months ago when I vowed to stop buying disposable water bottles -- a change which has significantly changed my recycling, my car cleanliness, and maybe saving me about $50 a month. The issue with these bottles has to do with a hormone mimicing chemical. Tugend writes:

Environmental groups and some scientists have raised concern that such plastic can leach bisphenol A, an endocrine-disrupting chemical. It is a big enough issue that last year, the National Toxicology Program Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction convened a 12-member expert panel to examine studies related to the chemical.

Sometimes it feels like a trend -- jumping from one thought to the next without any hard and fast answers. At the same time, sometimes it seems like we avoid an awful lot for convenience sake, and keeping things the same as they've been.

What does seem water-clear, is that the further we look carefully at the oil in our daily lives, the more questions, concerns, risks and toxins seem to leach out...

Ali Baba's Wife

By this means Marjaneh found that her master ‘Ali Baba had admitted thirty-eight robbers into his house, and that this pretended oil-merchant was their captain. She made what haste she could to fill her oil-pot, and returned into her kitchen, where, as soon as she had lighted her lamp, she took a great kettle, went again to the oil-jar, filled the kettle, set it on a large wood fire, and as soon as it boiled, went and poured enough into every jar to stifle and destroy the robber within.
Stories from the Thousand and One Nights. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

Today I've been looking for articles about boiling in oil as a form of torture and of the death penalty. I assume that it works because the boiling temperature of oil is very high -- coupled with its adherence to the skin and blocking of pours.

I'm interested in the old stories about oil too -- the use of oil as weapon -- but also the importance in cooking and lighting -- I guess it's not so different -- the sight of the oil truck lumbering from house to house -- from the image of a oil merchant traveling with barrels big enough to fit thieves.

In the story of Ali Baba is targeted because he stole from the thieves -- he found their treasure trove and took some of the wealth for themselves. I read that in Iraq, American Servicemen are referred to by the slang term, "Ali Babas."

One thing I've noticed is that it is much easier to find current reliable information -- I guess when it comes to history, books are still the place to go. That's kind of comforting, and kind of worrisome -- I think it probably means a lot of history is going to be lost.

It's crazy the things that are on the web. For one thing, an ex-military guy paid some Navy Seals to waterboard him on video, so that people could really see what it was. I couldn't watch. Also, there's a video of a Malaysian martial arts ritual where people wash their hands in boiling oil. I couldn't watch that, either -- I guess maybe I'm a little sensitive today.

A woman in South Mississippi killed her husband last year by (allegedly) pouring boiling oil over him while he slept.
Sanders is accused of pouring two or three quarts of boiling cooking oil on her husband, Sherman, on July 28. She fled with her two children in a white Pontiac Grand Prix, Garber said. Attorney Brian Alexander was appointed to represent Sanders on Thursday. Alexander also worked on the James Boswell capital murder case in 2005. He said Friday he believes his client will be acquitted when she has her day in court.
"When all of the facts are brought forth, it will be clear that Edna Mae's behavior was justified in light of the circumstances," he said. "She only acted in a way any reasonable, prudent person would have acted under similar circumstances." Link When Marjaneh saw him depart, she went to bed, satisfied and pleased to have succeeded so well in saving her master and family.

I'm sort of interested, too, in the idea of the weapons of the women revolving around their home duties -- lighting the lamp -- cooking. We use what we have, I suppose -- what we have access to.

Boundaries 2

I'm still thinking about boundaries -- about where they exist and don't.

The Oil Drum reported,
Today, someone in the NYMEX pit session paid $100 a barrel for front month crude oil.

That just means the price didn't stay there, but it got there. Big Deal (as in it is -- as in, it's no.)
The article on Bloomberg said:

``This is the culmination of everything that we talked about last year,'' said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. ``Various geopolitical problems have deteriorated overnight, in particular Nigeria and Pakistan. Commodities, and in particular oil, have become safe havens in a dangerous world.''
Nigeria, The Middle East, Venezuela... And: Prices rose 2.9 percent last week partly because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister. Pakistan borders Iran, which holds the world's second- biggest oil reserves, and is located along the Arabian Sea, where tankers travel before entering the Persian Gulf.

These things between us -- between here and there, you and me, up and down -- I'm much more interested in the way we travel over, and yet these markers seem to hold some undeniable psychological weight. It's not at all unlike New Year's day itself, really -- here we are, it's all the same as it was yesterday...

Passage over Water

by Robert Duncan

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,

lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.

The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last

under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,

gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,

the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel

your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt

over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,

you pass with ease into the destructive world.

There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,

falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore

and within the indestructible night I am alone.

link to the Poetry Foundation Archive
Robert Duncan, “Passage over Water” from Selected Poems. Copyright 1950 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

My Crimes

This from the New York Times
October 28, 1852

"Accidents by burning fluid" have come to be household words, and yet the use of the fluid is not, probably, at all diminished. Indeed, it would be very un-American to cease using an article because it would be abused. It is only old women who advocate the abolition of guns, and very silly men who insist on banishing calomel, antimony, and the lancet because they have been shamefully abused. If guns are safety, if the lancet has hurt anybody, send the phelebotomist back to school until he can tell where it is needed and how to manage it. Such is the doctrine of our day, and we hold the same regard to burning fluid which has already slain its thousands ... Oil. Yes, oil..."

1852!

The article goes on to talk about household safety and the pros and cons of candles...

One thing I love about these old articles is that the author don't struggle at all under the confines of modern journalism. The author makes no mistake of authority, and sarcasm and directives abound. It feels both quaint and refreshing to read them now. There is not the pretension so labored over now that the reporter should be an objective viewer. Keeping the "I" out of the narration of journalism is the base of our system of "fair and accurate" reporting -- but it is now understood that this is an impossible feat for a person to perform.

Yesterday I bought a little reprinted book by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
"Poetry As Insurgent Art."

"I am signaling you through the flames," "The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it." "Write living newspapers,"" "Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts" - in other words, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, to write mere "love poetry" in such times is "almost a crime."

I took this project off line starting today because I couldn't hear my own voice -- I was getting self-conscious, and concerned with readers -- lovers, mothers, strangers read these words with varying degrees of interest and discern. On the other hand, I am very much missing the conversation this morning... the log, like the letter, allows for a relief from the issue of author stance and readership, as both are naturally built in to the medium.

How does one person do anything of import? The poets and the reporters of before had no doubt of their importance -- they did not live inside of a globalized world -- they did not live inside of the slick that is our waters now -- or even a woman's body. This is nothing at all more than a log of learning and exploration.

Here we are. Here I am.
I am writing love poems. I am burning oil.
I'm not sure I know how to be anything else.

Happy New Year

In grad school one of my professors asked me in the middle of workshop, what are you afraid of? My answer then is the same as now -- something about self-consciousness v. audacity -- or love v. hate of the voice in the writing... This connection/disconnection dilemma is on my mind a lot right now.

I'm going to take this project off-line for a week -- just for a little grounding. I'm going to keep it going, though -- and I'll post them all at the end of the week. For those of you who have been reading, thank you so much, and I hope that you will read again next week!

I asked the same friend once, what happens if I deconstruct myself -- who will I be on the other side? He said that maybe I wasn't who I thought I was...

My favorite thing about New Years is that it feels like a little bit of a reset button.

Happy Happy New Year.

Boundaries

This year, a decision will be handed down in a case: "New Jersey V. Delaware."

New Jersey is supporting oil-giant BPs building of a natural gas facility edging into Delaware's land. I found this article on what might be my new favorite website, Energy Law 360.

“The intense opposition to LNG comes from the theory, quite mistaken, that LNG tankers are large bombs susceptible to blowing up and taking out major East Coast cities,” [said Stephen L. Teichler, an energy partner at Duane Morris LLP's Washington, D.C. office.].

And get this!

“Delaware considered legislation authorizing the National Guard to step in to protect Delaware’s borders from encroachment. And one New Jersey legislator even explored the seaworthiness of the decommissioned battleship New Jersey, currently docked as a museum on the Camden waterfront, in the event the state was forced to repel an armed invasion by Delaware."

Very strange thought. While state autonomy often seems to surface in regards to laws, the idea of one state taking up arms against another -- and using national resources to do it -- seems extremely unsettling this New Year's morn...

This story reminded me of another one I noticed during my brief oil spill Hiatus --

NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA

OIL SPILL SETS OFF BORDER DISPUTE: The environmental disaster wrought by last week's oil spill in the Kerch Strait off southern Russia, as reignited a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia in the region. Ukraine's foreign minister has blamed the tragedy, in which several sailors and thousands of birds and other wildlife perished, on the two country's failure to reach an agreement on navigation and the delimitation of borders in the strait and the Sea of Azov. Moscow has said that giving Ukraine control over the Kerch Strait, which Ukraine claims falls within its borders, would harm Russian security and economic interests.

This was a very small story in the midst of a roundup of top Russian news stories -- when I went to read the article it was, understandably, in Russian. But the issue is clear -- disaster sets in when people try to make boundaries in lieu of common sense.

I don't know -- boundaries is such a hot button word in pop-psychology -- maybe that's what I'm intrigued by. Over dinner the other night I was discussing Zionism with a man (the same man working to save Sanskrit) who thought Israel should just kick all the Palestinians out tomorrow. I'm a Zionist -- in practice, but not in theory.

That distinction has so much to do with the world. There are so many decisions that make sense in the moment, that make no sense with any sort of larger look at the world. What is at stake, what is forfeited through the requirement of autonomy, is just too big.

While I completely understand the need for self-protection, I also really think that no solutions can come maintaining an "us and them" mentality -- anywhere. There is no ownership, there is no time line. There is an I and a larger. Like the conversation about Americans and American poetics again -- where does the I fit in so that one (a person, a state, a country, an issue, a people, a world, a lover) is neither inflated nor diminished -- connected through communication; not alienated inside of it.

We are people -- who benefit from wealths and suffer from consequences -- living on this earth, in these homes, bodies and lungs. Better together.

Dr. Seuss - The Zax