Ban the Banns

I think we should ban marriage.  Well, no, not marriage.  Not legal and spiritual partnerships between two individuals.  And yes, I mean individuals.  Of any gender – biological or concocted.  Or, for that matter, species.  I mean, love is love.  If the aliens do come, and don’t wipe us all out at once, then interterrestrial love is an inevitability, so might as well get the legislation in order now.

What I mean is I think we should ban weddings.  Well, no, not ban, exactly.  I mean have a temporary moratorium on them.  For now, no more weddings.

And it’s not what you might think.  My attitude has nothing to do with social justice principles of poly-gendered domestic partner equity – although I do think the fundamentalists have GOT to get over themselves on that one.  It’s such a non-issue for them.  Why can’t they stick to their own backyard of religious extremism, bad fashion sense, and overall tightassedness?  Who called them fundamentalists in the first place?  They should be called dourdamentalists.  Boredamentalists.  Just plain mental.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with them.  Nor does it have anything to do with the obscene amounts of money, food, bad hairdos, tacky stationary, long-expired dance trends, sentimental photography, and expensive, unflattering coutoure routinely dedicated to overblown, fantasy-ridden commitment ceremonies, half of which won’t actually stick.

Well, no, it has something to do with that.  Specifically, it has to do with wedding gifts, most of which – I can tell you from personal experience – are downright horrible.  Hiddiemonsters as my husband and I used to call them.  In fact, now that I’ve been married 10 years and the statue of limitations on Insincere Wedding Loot Gratitude has expired, I’ll confess the dark truth. 

A week after our wedding, as my new hubby and I were packing up our battered pickup for a cross-country move, we had a big yard sale and converted most of our wedding gifts into gas money.  First night on the road, husband-guy lost the bulk of our nest egg to some friends in a poker game.  We might have gone down as one of the shorter non-celebrity marriages on record had his friends not been conscious, good-hearted people who gave it all back.

It has nothing to do with the money, though, or poker.  It has to do with the presents themselves, and the fact that they were all shipped to us in boxes, which, upon opening, contained 10% present and 90% packing peanuts. It’s the peanuts!  I hate those things.  Not as much as I hate the entire Bush administration, but more than I hate Hummers.

To fine tune the scale, I hate them about as much as I hate GW himself.  They are both examples of banal, air-filled, maliciousness disguised as something benign and helpful, and actually operating in service of a much more concentrated, robust, and Machiavellian evil. 

Mostly, though, I hate packing peanuts because they’re desperately annoying.  They stick to things, they waft tantalizingly out of reach in the slightest breeze, they don’t weigh anything, so if you accidentally knock over a container of them, they go flying everywhere.

True, some are biodegradable, but how can you tell, and how many people have a handy compost pile?  Or, how many tree-hugging eco-freaks are going to keep a box of peanuts in the bathroom, and toss down a handful with every flush?   Plus, who’s going to take the non-flushables and find a company which will re-use them?  Nobody!  Most people are going to take the easy way out and throw them away – creating more mostly non-biodegradable garbage.

As I write this, I, a peanut-flushing eco-freak, am apartment-sitting for - get this - a Republican.   A Republican lawyer.  On his honeymoon with a raging lefty theater designer.   All of which speaks well for humanity’s potential to collaborate in the face of grave ideological differences.  I mean, he knows the extreme tilt of my leftward leanings and still doesn’t fear for the sanctity of his possessions or the safety of his cat.  After all, who knows what kind of pagan animal sacrifice I might perform on the deck amid the late-season basil and planters of tratescantia?

Little does he know, I’m teaching the cat to whisper “Bush Sucks” in his ear while he sleeps.

In large part, it was the deck which made the apartment-sit so appealing, as I was told it is sunny and quiet – unusual for New York, and an ideal place to write the Great American Whatever. 

I arrived late at night, introduced myself to Jack the Cat, a.k.a. Mr. Kitty – a silky, black-haired creature with green saucer-eyes and a creepy level of self-possession, even for a cat – and crawled into bed.  I awoke early, excited to start a two-week writing retreat, and eager to see the Deck of Creativity.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the patio door and stumbled upon what had clearly been Wedding Gift Unpacking Central.  The entire deck, plants and all, was littered, covered, utterly lousy with packing peanuts.  Not only that, but hundreds of them had wedged themselves into the gaps between the planking, and thousands more had fallen down to the sub-floor, about four inches below.  Even if I manage to corral all the free-roaming and wedged-but-still-reachable peanuts, countless huddled masses of them will remain in plain sight, but utterly out of reach.

Cleaning up the peanuts - like sharpening pencils or grinding coffee or sorting all the CDs by alphabetical order – seemed like good writerly procrastin – I mean, preparation.  However, I pray for favorable attention from Calliope (Head Muse), as I can foresee that a serious case of The Block would necessitate devoting several days to pulling up all the planking, recovering the trapped peanuts, and then replacing any rotten wood – easily done now that Manhattan now has its own Home Depot.  The problem is, I have a delirious fetish for Home Depot, and could end up Queer Eyeing the entire place without ever typing a word.

As I tidied the deck and sang cantons to Calliope, I discovered a sizeable cache of take-out coffee cups and pastry bags, all emblazoned with…what familiar green logo?  Starbucks, of course!  Starbucks!  Second only to packing peanuts in the horror of their ubiquity.  Starbucks!  A plague upon modern life, spreading sanitizing homogeneity (and overpriced coffee) across the American landscape. 

Sanitizing?  You don’t believe me?  Children, when I first lived in Seattle, in the years  when Microsoft was just a software company, Nirvana was just a band, and Starbucks was just a coffee shop, our friends behind the counter had a different logo.  Same mermaid, but the circle around her was larger, so you could see the whole of her fish-like tail.  Plus, she had a belly button. 

Apparently, as the company grew, some mid-level manager in a desperate ploy for recognition and upward advancement decided that the bottom of the tail, with its split flukes, looked much too crotch-like for mass appeal and easy imperialist expansion.  Convinced that censorship was the fast track to higher profit margins, the Coffee Powers agreed, and they Tightened The Circle.  But please, people, IT WAS A TAIL!  SHE’S A MERMAID! 

As far as the omphalectomy goes, while I abhor its prudish origins, I can’t help wondering if the actual problem was that a bellybutton on a mermaid isn’t anatomically correct.  After all, if mermaids are half fish, maybe they lay eggs.

Anyway, frustrated as I am with the virginization of the Mermaid, I do give Starbucks credit for promoting fair trade coffee and celebrating Earth Day - but only partial credit.  Why?  Because all that eco-posturing doesn’t disguise the fact that with all the one-use coffee cups and plastic lids and paper bags and stir-sticks, they are still an enormous generator of solid waste. 

The stir-sticks alone cause me all kinds of grief in the Morally Righteous Choices department.  They offer both wood and plastic sticks, replicating the “paper or plastic” conundrum at the grocery store.  My impulse is to choose wood.  However, given the fact that so much tropical rainforest has been laid waste to make the paper-enveloped, can-never-split-them-evenly-and-always-get-splinters-in-your-tongue chopsticks familiar to kung pao eaters everywhere, I fear, deeply, the origin of the little wooden stir-sticks.

But back to the deck.  Clearly, what happened is that the bridal couple were overwhelmed with gifts, and could subsist for days on nothing but raspberry scones and pumpkin poundcake while they sank deeper and deeper into packing peanut overwhelm.  And what kind of a way is that to start married life?  Over-caffeinated, sugar-shocked, and up to their hips in solid waste.

I guess it is time to ban marriage.  Bad for your health and bad for the environment.