My Fear Factor - Does Oil EVER biodegrade and Is This It? Basically forever?

Liberation Angel

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Sun Jun-06-10 09:57 PM
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My Fear Factor - Does Oil EVER biodegrade and Is This It? Basically forever?

Let me preface my thoughts with this:

I pray that there is some hope, But I am losing it.

Bear with me: I am a writer and mostly here I just rant or argue - but these events are deeply fearsome to me and sad and I do not want to be in denial about it. I need, like that oil, to vent because the pressure is too much and I need some release. So i rise and spill, or rather, effluze:

When I was a kid my sister and her husband and their kids had a place in the keys, a little fishing joint in Marathon. Not too far from Bahia Honda (which is a wildlife refuge among other things near the seven mile bridge)

My grandma and uncles lived in Miami and my uncle was a birder - took me to the Everglades and we watched the birds all the way down to Flamingo. Gators and Crocs too.

I have never been to the Islands in the Caribbean - to me paradise was always the Florida Keys, Big Cypress, Anhinga Trail, Panthers (yeah real panthers), Bahia Honda, Big Pine, Key Deer on No Name, Mangrove Mama's (Hippy seafood and reggae and margaritas and joints out back under the Banana tree). I picked mangoes and avocados and papaya and sold watermelon as a teenager at Sunset at mallory Square for a quarter a slice with the Conch's from conch village (a shanty town then now something more catchy). I'd snorkel at Fort Jackson where they have artificial reefs with real coral growing (fierce wizardly Barracuda and aquamarine green azure pink coral parrot fish and manta rays and Big scary eels and SCHOOLS of things like clownfish and engelfish and which you need an underwater scorecard to even remember them all in every color and shape imaginable - like meteors and showers of fireworks they pranced and swarmed) --- and I scavenged scrap metal on the (illegally( military proving grounds where we recovered brass fittings from ammo dumps on the islands where they tested handgrenades (aluminum full of shrapnel buried in pits 20 feet across) and spearfished off Christmas Tree Island for Grouper drinking pineaplle wine on the boat of some Cubam refugees who'd escaped to the Keys. Saw three waterspouts dancing together beautifully, twisted around like a cotillion before they smashed into the neighboring island and rained and stormed down on us with salt, gulf, water pouring down from the spouts.

As the years went by and I had kids I's take them back. Go get devoured by mosquitoes in the Mahogany hammocks of the Vast Salt Marshes, look at the gators lolling, the anhinga, the roseate spoonbills maybe, ibis and great blue herons - patient, watchful, observant, fishing, like great tiny dinosaurs, predators from millions of years past, lurching at their prey, tossing it.

I watched the Pellys. The gracefully humorous brown pelicans or gray ones. Their huge pouches full of salt water and chum , like seagulls, you can feed them and they appreciate it They looked like they were laughing and they were like majestic monsters when they flew - graceful and strange and absurd.

There was a dolphin harbor (and I used to go to the Seaquuarium where the original Flipper was filmed and see Flipper, REALLY< dance and jump and chatter and play and smile out of the Miami seashore outer banks (Key Biscayne) near Pig Pine and there were a mated pair who lived there, but were free to come and go. But they LIKED hanging out with the humans and they would come near and let you pat them as they swam by from the shore, or dock, and occasionally they would head out for a few days and then come back cause the chum was free and the people were amused (or maybe we were amusing to them too because we loved them).

I read a post in the prayer to the Spaghetti Monster, Goddess or God thread by a weeping NorthofDenali who says that twenty years later the Exxon Valdez crude death sludge is STILL there. It is STILL awful.

And I thought: If a plastic bag can last a thousand years. How long will tar sludge last? How long will a thick muck of viscosity move around and will it simply EVER decompose or decay? Nah. It doesn't. It will break aprt but just into more and more tiny visuous pieces of illness and death.

These thick wastes of sludge from all the waste which has been oozing down into that deepness and pressure for HOW MANY MILLIONS OF YEARS? is NOT going away.

What is going away is our earth, our paradises, our joy, our memories, our palm trees.

When I drive down I like to go to the Native archeological site at Crystal River on the west coast and look for Manatee. I used to sytop at the Micosukee craft shops (before the casinos) and last year I took my teenage kids, and daughter's boyfriend and we camped on manatee Lake and in the park and near Bahia Honda at the Aquaranch where you can swim with HUGE Cobia in a primordial experience unlike anything I can imagine, They are like giant catfish and you pet them and be careful because they are ancient and monstronomous (and apparently tasty) and we pet the baby sharks in the shark pool.

And I hear St Pete's and Tampa can SMELL the wretched chemical smell of oil and I think back to changing my oil last month and how my hands stank and the smell made me wretch and I could not get the slippery ooze and grease off of me - and I wonder what kind of art this would make Dali create (for his Museum in St. Petersburgh is on the Bay and surely the hell will smell there and the black sheen will coat the docks by his sculptures of time , a clock, standing still or melting on a park bench on the dock. It is unreal. Surreal. Bizarre, It will be revolting. Would Dali have shined his moustache with that sheen? Would he have cried? Would he have?

And the Florida Museum of the Holocaust - there in St. Petersburgh, will the odors there remind visitors of the smell of the petrochemical plants of the Buna, of Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald and Oswitz, Upper Silesian oil and mineral fields exploited by the Bushes and the Rockefellers and Morgans and Esso and most probably BP and Aramaco (since the Arabs with oil deal also had deals with the Swine and EVERYBODY did business with them too - but especially the oil comapnies BECAUSE Auschwitz was a PetroChemical plant and MUST HAVE SMELLED< aside from the Creamatoria (which are probably coming next for the "natural" disposal of corpses like dolphins and Pellys and turtles and whales and bluefin tuna because they will smell like shit too soon along with the little birds and rotten decaying eggs).

Will people remember (if they were in the Shoah there) that the smells were not too different from the fascist petrochemical cartel ops at the slave camps wit their synthetic oil and tires and munitions and pharmaceuticals.

Of course WE will not remember because we were NOT there.

We are HERE. And the memories NOW will be of nausea and death and inaction and greed and the folly of "reasonableness, appeasement and looking forward and not back. of letting Cheney Bush halliburton and the Oil Companies get away with a Naiziist Naziphilic raping and despoiling of the earth.

For Capitalism. For Fascism. For Greed.

My beautiful places will be almost all gone. Maybe forever. Certainly most of my lifetime yhey will be crippled and smeared (tarballs will always be sticking to our feet).

Will it EVER break down? Ever? Its been there 65 million years hasn't it. Can it EVER be washed away?

Can ANY of us be washed clean of this? Can our President?

Can humanity?

Or do we just need to turn to the drak oil sooner rather than later and let the Earth heal herself with the plague of human beings forever silenced and buried?

Just asking. I think its pretty much over.

Please tell me I am wrong.

Or raise a toast to what was a pretty sweet place at times (just ask papa Joe - he knew - and he revelled in it).

No more.

I know that plastic stays in the environment for many many years.