Category Archives: Practical Details

Character Development, Practical Details

The Chaos Project

From Zeus’s head, from Jupiter’s thigh, a child was born.

Chaos laid cosmic eggs.

Ash, Elm bore young ones. As did a glowing stalk of bamboo, sea foam, night, dust, a bone, a giant peach, a block of salty ice licked by a cow. A rock bore light. Maggots in giants’ flesh became children.

Some were impregnated by sun beams, wind, and golden rain, by lightning, dreams of sun, and a bundle of feathers, by a footprint, by leaning against a plum tree, and by devouring an abuser’s genitals.

By her father’s genitals cast in ocean waves Venus was born of foam.

And that is just one entry in Wikipedia on “miraculous birth”! Think of the solutions already written.

Among the powers we needed for this ideal was a method for reproduction that was truly a choice, one supported structurally, one not required of a woman’s body, one liberated from the claims of seed, of bio-kinship, of patriarchal lineage, of enframement, of slavery, of isolation from the safety net.

We needed to remember how to receive each offspring as magical gift, as bringer of insight, as sign of health, as love embodied.

Summer 2022. The golden women responded to the post-Roe crisis in the United States just as they had helped refugees of authoritarianism and climate crisis globally: they used their privilege and their vast wealth to fill gaps in policy.

CNN estimated that there would be 180,000 unwanted babies born every year in 26 states with no social safety net for these children, let alone their families.

The golden women of SIA were ready for them. They had already created the alternative structures we needed to support thriving.

Here, their underground storing, sharing, transferring network quietly moved, moved women seeking procedures, collected tissues, and, when this failed, supported women and children, incorporating them into the grand vision, into the arms of fictive kinship, where they could be relieved, nurtured, healed, and protected from further trauma.

The primary goal was to stock the arks with future generations of humans who would be born to the various projects of the Multiversity.

* * * * *

Circe and Persephone were products of the Chaos Project, born in Texas and Mississippi in the Fall of 2022, their brave mothers among many lost on the birthing room table as maternal mortality rates soared, especially for women of color.

The were the youngest among us, only 7 when they buckled themselves into the shuttle with us.

Little Priestesses, murmured Juno as she placed a warm hand to each beloved cheek: Circe with her pet pig, Persephone with her calico cat.

They would receive the Wiki in 10 years. They would help us to guide the first generation born on the awaiting ark.

They would remember Earth with us, Earth in all her wonders still apparent on the day we said goodbye and watched her become the blue marble we had known in images all our lives.

What Circe had not expected was the thrill of the stars rushing toward her. It seemed to her that she was reeled in by them, by magical silk skeins of invisible thread like the fibers of her largest muscle, like the nerves that electrified her, like capillaries, veins, arteries that brought her breath.

She knew she was made of star stuff. She could faintly remember. She did not fear death, though she had been protected from it. It had been her fate.

Death is but a portal, she knew.

She patted her pig who she called Daddy O, with a knowing smile, having been reared on the legend of her own name.

Snort, snort, Odysseus replied, smart enough to know she had her own pig’s part to play.

On this ark, all took the pronoun she.

Practical Details, Vision

The Killing Eve Project

Queer viewers have always been required to read subtext, to cross-body identify, and to transcend death. (Whoever you are, pop television has always given us hope of a new season–with Dolores rising from the dead as a new character most recently. Unless we see the flatline while we watch the surgeon beating on the chest, then open the ribs and massage the heart, we should never be sure.

Even then, the coffin deep beneath the soil—can we be sure? Is our hero down there, unexpired? Will she rise?)

Gay marriage legalized, some thought they could sink into norms and narratives made for them.

I missed being an outlaw. I missed the ache at the end, the secrecy, even the lover that turned out to be a Russian spy. I missed walking out of the theater into the rain brokenhearted.

I get it. How lovely it would be to have happily ever after; we are all so tired from this resilience. The idea of being lulled to sleep, deep in the arms of our sweet soulmate, tempts.

But Queer is awake, resisting, throwing coins and heels at cops, throwing ashes on the White House lawn, rising from the dead in the New Earth.

If killing was an allegory for refusing heteropatriarchy, death is but a portal.

So, Villanelle awoke humorously heroic from her watery grave, thrumming with Russian accent, showing the whites of her eyes. Immediately teasing Eve anxious at her bedside. Charming as ever.

Her many bullet holes were patched with mycelial webs. Breath kept in their gills had sustained her in the depths, brought her afloat to the surface, liberated.

Your love made Villanelle and Eve real, real as the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse.

Then, the golden women and their Mycellium friend had intervened before the tragic tale could take again.

Even as they sent so many of us starward on our arks, the golden women saw the need for an Earth-based project, an agency of assassins, discreditors, bots and castrators would be needed to slow the tide of authoritarianism.

2049. Villanelle, now farsighted, peeking from behind a newspaper over her reading glasses, seemingly domesticated in her blissful love with Eve—who is still busy, obsessively pursuing proof and pattern in the criminal world.

Villanelle at work in her school of young assassins, rolling her eyes, overtly competitive with her own students and fellow teachers (also revived from the television narrative.)

And the 12. Carolyn, Konstantin, Hélène…They were the uncompromising priestesses of the dark morality of Earth. Pest control was always part of her toolbox.

Some were born for this, as Villanelle had discovered she was—not broken, but gloriously herself. Much to Eve’s chagrin and joy, their love and the violence of its challenge to the structures of the Old was uncontainable and impossible to repress.

It was a controversial experiment—but the Mycelium had taught that nature was ever-adapting for the flourishing of her various networks and communities.

The Master’s Tools Cannot Dismantle the Master’s House. Or can they?

We shall see in a millennium.

Practical Details

Space Travel

At times over the years, I would jolt awake, alert with some practical question. How would we grow food? How many would we be in a 5-mile diameter ship?

How, in our limited bodies and lifespans, to travel so far and stay away so long?

There were many projects in the Multiversity, which was a lab for utopias, a fleet of arks to preserve earth’s ecosystems, and a grand collaboration, a network of ocean currents, weather, and migration paths, most of which we had given to the Mycelium to work out.

Among the many projects, there were cryo-travelers, who would awaken in one thousand years having slept through the millennium of our retreat from Earth.

Some argued that we needed to be awake, to live, to die, to try, fail, learn, discover and create across generations of travelers. Our bodies were needed for these projects. When our lives ended, knowledge could be passed on as it always had been.

Somehow, with the set of common values, disciplines, and ethics we had built within SIA, we could build new constructs that would vanquish the old isms and institute new arrangements of power.

Old ones too. Some projects were built upon recreating lost knowledges, understandings of nature and power that had long been labelled “occult.”

When I was a teacher on earth, my students would quote an old truism that I believed to be false: we study the past in order to not repeat it, they said.

However, when climate change threatened, some turned to traditional Indigenous knowledges in hopes that those ancient projects might save Earth. They studied the past to remember how, to repeat ways of living in relationship with the planet that had been lost.

My brother Andy was involved in such a project, with our friend Amoret, on a Western European Ark with a druidic, celtic, wiccan vision.

I looked forward to visiting.

With the weather and the ocean currents and the migration paths of birds, we would move through the Multiversity by shuttle, exchanging and visiting one another’s projects, challenging one another, learning new ideas.

The original visioners, like Juno, and the Mycelium knew that the cryo-travelers would not miss out either. And in death, the rest of us would join these “Dreamers,” who slept knit into the collective unconscious, into all of time, into all of the projects, in the Otherworld some of us visited in meditations or in shamanic journeying or in our nightly rest.

The Mycelium would facilitate our remembering.

2029. As we buckled into our shuttle on that dark winter day. I looked around at these long-held friends.

Fourteen of us, some of whom you will come to know well.

I looked to the empty seat where Camilla would have been. Beside it, Gallia, whose face was filled with sorrow and, as ever, heroic excitement.

Manny gets it, her Ludmilla long gone. Xan seeing the future, unable to show us, is missing my brother, Andarto, already on his ark with Amoret, a friend to Britomartis who buckles in across from me, her dark hair gone grey, her blue eyes still impossibly blue.

Cly and the other team too.

As for me, Juno is beside me, my teacher. Dido is here. I am sitting at the right side of her. As always, she knows, puts a warm hand to my shoulder and leans forward to turn towards me, her half smile.

You will see.

Our Ark awaited above the blue. At night we had seen it as a star, a satellite moving across the slower expanse.

My heart pounding as the engines roared to life, as the countdown began.

It still seemed inconceivable. I smiled, thinking of an old movie. And this made me remember all that I was leaving. I closed my eyes tight.

We had had plenty of time to consider mortality. That we would die in space, we knew. The new ones would be born there.

Our hopes for Earth would be entrusted with children born in Arks far from the woods and rivers and skies so beloved to us.

We would raise them to their projects. When they turned 24, they would remember everything.

Then we would let go.

Or so we believed.

Our Planet, Practical Details

Transforming History

The first time I noticed it was in June 2022, an article in my feed that said our evolutionary trees were incorrect, based as they were on appearances: in fact, we are more closely related to those beings from our geographic location. Elephant shrews more closely related to elephants than to shrews. Because they come from the African continent, along with aardvarks, golden moles and swimming manatees.

And then there was another study showing that monarch butterflies were not dying out, but able to rapidly return under the right conditions. In fact, they were thriving.

In fact, there began to be a lot of great news in my feed. Something was changing. Was it my algorithm? Or was it history?

No doubt, whatever the explanation, I could sense the importance of our work. I could feel it was already working. Somehow.

I mean, it made sense that as we returned, we would bring ecosystems isolated for a millennium back to the planet. Each one would have more in common.

But how was it already happening?

We had returned before we had left.

Practical Details

The Venus Problem

How was it possible for us to process the raw materials for our multiversity on Venus of all places?! Acid rain. Temperatures as hot as an oven cleaning cycle. A series of volcanic eruptions had caused a runaway greenhouse effect. The resulting density of the CO2 rich atmosphere as great as that at 3000 feet under sea level. A slow rotation.

This environment had crushed the Russian probe, Venera 7, when it made the first Venusian soft landing on December 15, 1970.

Venus, it has been theorized, lacks water on the surface, plate tectonics, and abundant life enough to correct the extremities of that environment and make it habitable. But in 2020, observers of Venus captured evidence of phosphine gas in the planet’s atmosphere that suggested the presence of life.

A race to Venus began. We hoped we would be gone by the time this race was won—if Earthling societies were still able to sustain such ambition against the decay of their infrastructure.

How did SIA solve the Venus problem?

The Venus solution lays in that first probe in 1970, the lucky Venera, Russian for Venus, morning star. Also for Lucifer, the fallen angel. The intersections here of the goddess of love and the angel who refused to worship man are perfectly suited to the explanation we must offer.

On one side of the story, three astronomers in the Soviet Union met in graduate school and began to scan the skies and to document the existence of astral bodies, lesser planets or asteroids caught in the gravity of the solar system. Lyudmila Chernykh, born 1935 – died 2017. Nikolai Chernykh 1931 – 2004. And Tamara Smirnova 1935 – 2001.

In tarot, threes present us with expectation, with collaboration, with betrayal, and with reconciliation. In these passionate connections, the problem of torn loyalties presents itself, the challenge of third parties that take from two: of lovers, work, and children. Here is the place where two produce a third and the world is never the same. Defection, hybridity, all are in play as a third comes in.

Lyudmila was the kind of woman you did not expect to find behind a telescope. Tall, femme, brash and brilliant, she possessed the hearts and bodies of both Nikolai and Tamara. But 1958 was a dangerous time for the thing she had with Tamara. So, she married Nikolai.

It was understood by Niki that Lyudmila’s love for Tamara did not leave when he placed the ring on her hand. Tamara, calm, deep, with her dark humor and her charisma, her sleek, auburn head bent over her calculations, her steady shocking eyes when she looked up to meet Lyudmila’s. Tamara’s was the gaze that still tumbled Lyudmila into the void where fire, water, and the very matter between the stars ruled her.

When Lyudmila chose Niki, Tamara went silent, cut through with her loss. But all three were assigned to the same project for the next 7 years and she found a way to work companionably with her married friends. They mapped the stars. Then Nikolai was drafted into the Venera project. Lyudmila left with him. Tamara went onward alone.

Across the Pacific, a daughter was born to Gloria Bitterwater, a west-Canadian Indigenous medicine woman of the Eagle-Wolf moiety. When she turned 18, Bernice asked her mother again who her father was and her mother told her this time of a geologist, John Ralph, who had come to study volcanoes in the region. She had gone with him as guide and to protect the sacred places he wanted to study. Gloria did not tell Bernice what happened. She said, “and then, you came along!”

It was John Ralph, still studying volcanoes who took Bernice to Siberia. This was where she, 19, met Tamara, then 33, high on an icy mountain where the telescope pointed to the stars, below which rested an ancient, sleeping volcano, which her birth father wanted to study.

Before Bernice Bitterwater left for the airport and Siberia, Gloria had taken up her hand, which was brown and small and sure, just like her mother’s. The medicine woman put a pouch into Bernice’s palm and said, when you go there, look for the red bird, it is what is missing. And she called the pouch a word in Athabascan, one that Bernice, who spoke her native tongue (as well as English, Russian, French, and Greek), understood well.

Long ago, her people had come across the ocean on boats. They had brought this red bird, a kind of mushroom. The ancient people had made it a part of their medicine. It had flourished deep in their mountains. But then, inexplicably, it had left. The ancient people tried but could no longer cross over to the land where it came from.

Bernice was to bring the red bird home with her from Siberia. She was to leave the pouch in Siberia in return.

But something else happened too.

Bernice met Tamara. And like Lyudmila before her, the sight of Tamara’s dark head bent over her calculations, the raising of her gaze. From the very first moment Bernice met her, it was as though she was shot through with stars and joy.

Bernice found the red bird deep in that Siberian volcano. It was unmistakable. She brought it home to Gloria Bitterwater and her people. When she left Siberia and Tamara, she followed her mother’s direction, to leave the pouch there. But she left the pouch with Tamara, including the small start of the red bird she had added.

She said simply, “here.”

She trusted her heart to show her that Tamara was the part of Siberia she was meant to give the medicine to. She could always feel Tamara’s wound. She felt it against her own ribcage, where she too had been struck with love. She intuitively understood how she reminded Tamara of Lyudmila—for Bernice was also brash and brilliant and femme, in her way. In a way that shocked Tamara with memory and sent her spiraling into ancestral losses as well.

“What is this?” said Tamara. And Bernice answered with the Athabascan word.

When Tamara looked into her eyes with a question, Bernice with her command of many languages struggled, wanting to meet that sweetness, that mutualness, that fire. “It is not easy to translate” she said. “I guess it means world. It means home. It means light.”

Then Bernice went home.

Tamara put the pouch under her pillow, missing her lover’s body. Then, she began to dream.

Now, Tamara was a scientist. But love makes even a scientist open in ways that bear no explanation. She had been touched and changed by love twice in her life, already, by the young age of 33.

Let’s say, it took time. Let’s imagine the persistence of the dream, how repetitive, how she woke grasping for what she had learned she must do. Grabbing at pen and paper to jot the dream down before it slipped away, unaided as dreams are by the remembering parts of her brain, which had been resting while she slept, instead of grooving.

But one day, before it was too late, she took the pouch to her old love Lyudmila and she said, this must go to the Morning Star on the Lucifer 7. Does that make sense?

And it did make a little bit of sense to Lyudmila, who had become a mother in the last few years. She looked into Tamara’s eyes and she felt the same old falling feeling. Lyudmila was never the kind to harden or to put on armor. She was not one to remember or dread pain. She knew it had taken Tamara courage to come back. She accepted without questioning the love gift of the pouch.

Nikolai was like Lyudmila in this way—he could never say no to the one he loved. And in 1970, as he prepared the probe for the journey to Venus, he slipped the little pouch into a nook. He knew how fine the calculations for a soft landing could be. He would always wonder whether that pouch had made the Venera 7 the lucky one to land.

Lucky before it caved under the pressure of the atmosphere, that is! He smiled and he stroked his beard when he thought of this.

In the darkness of the Venera 7, the red bird birthed a small colony, integrating with the other medicine in the pouch, lighting the probe as it coursed through the void, feeling the dark matter, the map of the stars.

Little world, home, light. The Mycelium burst forth onto Venus from the probe as it landed.

She flipped the antennae helplessly into the hot mud, but not before she had sent out a message back to Nikolai and the Russian astronomers:

“Hot, hot, dry, no water here, heavy.” said the Mycelium, giving herself some forty years to prepare the way for us.

Practical Details

Space Opera

When all of this started, there was a genre of science fiction concerned with the practicalities of space travel: a man stranded on Mars grew potatoes; when the water filtration on the ship broke down, the travelers captured crystallized water released from the ship’s membrane; CO2 levels made astronauts go mad and projects ended in pragmatic tragedy.

The first SIA mission to space began at this level, in a recycled clunker of a ship bound for Venus. They were brave in their suits with their oxygen tanks and their detailed plans for how to cycle down the energy needed for the very basic earthly mechanism of photosynthesis that close to the sun.

But they also had an ally with a capacity for great leaps of intelligence. Part of their experiment was that symbiotic relationship. Even as they flew towards Venus, the Mycelium and the human workers processing the waste collected by the golden women grew their technology in leaps and bounds, so that they soon had a vast empire of waste management and recycling. Then. building and growing, they came to a way of surviving and of concealing the magnitude of their project beneath the soupy atmosphere of that golden planet named, ironically, after the goddess of love—for she rained down acid.

Mycelium that had developed a tolerance to sulphuric acid in the fermentation industry’s waste management processes in China expanded its ability to resist, but also transform the fatal rains that fell constantly from the Venusian skies. The cleansed rains, the clouds of carbon dioxide, breathed and filtered and transformed into bright pools of sulfur, fed the gardens that soon grew into alien rainforests that exhaled oxygen.

The SIA and their ships could have remained there. But the cloud thickening mechanisms they built to mute the heat of the sun for their gardens numbed and dulled the light and could not meet their need for blue skies, for golden warmth on their skins and lashes, and for enough starshine to bake their clothes and the crowns of their heads on a hot summer’s day.

There was a Ray Bradbury story about this longing. The sun broke the clouds for one hour every seven years.

Besides, they would need to stay away from Earth for over a millennium. Were they so close to the blue swirls of their home planet, close enough to view the land of their ancestors as a star in the sky, they might not be able to resist that call.

They knew Earth needed time to purge and then to heal. They were determined to give it to her.

The astronomers of SIA had identified a pattern in the great randomness of the Milky Way in maps modeled after histories marked in ancient sites, at Stonehenge, at Machu Picchu, at the Great Pyramids under the gaze of the Sphinx, according to the Mayan calendar, and in alignment with those other mysterious tools for marking time and mapping space that were monuments to the old ones.

In 2050, the pattern would align again.

The people of SIA and their Multiversity of Arks would be waiting there.

At the Mirror, ready for the opening of the gate.

Practical Details

My Phoenicians

Crete, at our little school. 2028.

The arks now above us, planted with the “seeds” of everything on Earth. Some cultivated, much stored for when we return in a millennium. Somehow our SIA scientists and the Great Mycelium had found a way to freeze the genetic material of an entire planet in tiny packets that could bloom again.

Like those sea monkeys advertised in comic books when we were kids.

Each ark began five miles across, made of repurposed garbage, of space junk too, and of broken stars, fragments of other apocalypses captured in asteroid fields.

Five miles across: massive scale for a ship, but such small containers for a desperate world.

When the fires of 2020 blazed through the Pacific Northwest, I thought of Australia the winter before. The Amazon the summer before that. We collectors grieved wilderness that raised us, places we had touched, creatures we had heard rustling there. Birds.

Or a place where bright flowers had yearly bloomed. I would look for that shock of orange paintbrush. But these seeds were burned out beneath the blackness left behind a brighter orange, within the green heart of flames. They were probably already choked in dust of drought before the blaze was even set.

But by 2019, Juno and the scientists of SIA were already ready. They had been combing those woods for years, carrying it all gently, lovingly, down into labs underground. They were discrete, disinterested in attention, and humble about their ingenuity. Members shared intellectual property long held in traditions, locked in stories and old ways of being with the land.

I joined the collectors on Crete soon after, shipping down from Athens on a slow ferry that dropped me off in the middle of the night. I sat upside all day upon the dark blue seas, as my polarized glasses made purple glitter of the Aegean turning aside, made brilliant white the foam. I arrived weary, wind whipped and wild—as I liked to be.

Crete felt like an ancient homecoming.

The more I studied, the more I understood why. Our purpose, the great cycles of history and consciousness, also opened like the sea there will: suddenly to aquamarine shallows like sea beasts that heaved gently on rocks burned gold in Aegean sunlight.

I would lay on my back in the surf at Kalantos Beach and remember Theseus arriving and leaving Crete. And before him, Phoenicians, the clever sailors who fished the Mediterranean for art and good trade.

My Phoenicians carried the tiny turtle islands, earth seeds, up into the heavens on ships that all believed transported garbage. They secreted them away on those temporary satellites, our arks, until we were ready to join them.

Meanwhile, I was part of a team of knowledge collectors, archivists, historians, and educators for schools of the refugees of capitalism, of climate change, of authoritarianism, of militarism, of colonialism, of toxic masculinity and white supremacy. Children who had come across the dark seas, in the night, at great cost and their mothers, their queer uncles, their trans-aunts.

We are all orphans of these forces we called the isms, all survivors. From our suffering and our healing we developed curriculum for the newcomers to our shores—in hopes of healing trauma, lest we build from it and build new monsters.

How to transform survivalism into utopias? This would be our project.

We would try and try many ways, fail, and try again. But the children remembered and they taught us much of the time before birth. We began to piece the great hologram together, the faint complete picture on each of the elements that made us, becoming clearer.

In a practical sense, we were creating a massive database. We were learning and saving all the tongues of our planet to keep them safe and return them one day, to let them loose on Earth’s winds long after we died and went into the soil to feed the Great Mycelium of our arks.

Our priestesses would carry the knowledge we gathered and the visions we dreamed on tiny implants that woke their minds, wove them back into the collective consciousness.

We would be remembered forever there.

As would Earth.

Practical Details

Masks and Armor

It wasn’t the death threats that brought me to SIA (as a guy in my AA meeting said, “so it’s your fifteen minutes of fame.”) Nor was it having my promotion blocked by the senior men in the History Department. It also wasn’t the one who went back to her husband or the one who hated how I guessed her mind—or tried to.

It was the quiet after all the drama. It was the Grim. The sepia days. The question as I drove around town: this is so hard; why do it?

When the pandemic of 2020 hit, I was a newcomer in SIA. I had a sponsor. I attended meetings. I had only begun to work step one. I learned from the old timers, who had been around the rooms for decades about my powerlessness over the isms: how we were survivors of it, but how, as survivors, we had also become perpetrators of it. Life had become unmanageable. Suicide seemed like an option. For many, homicide seemed viable. Some had done time in prison. Most of us lost sleep and peace fantasizing about revenge.

One day, between the lonesome of Thanksgiving and the lonely of Christmas, I had stomped the snow off my boots and entered the fogged glass doors at the Gargoyle Church. There they were: my people.

I quickly became dependent on the community in the rooms. I looked up to the elders there: to Juno, to Dido, to Britomart and Manel. My brother Andy, leaned back and grinned when I came in, tucked his bottom lip up. Camilla, as always inseparable from Gallia, stood and took me into her rough arms, then sat me beside her from day one, elbowing me gently and winking at me as the room laughed. I remembered this from AA—stories that would have shocked outsiders. We laughed because we were no longer alone.

The other newcomers, Cly, and Xan met my eyes from within their own raw armor, a glint of hope cutting through above the shadows.

Then, the elders took us to coffee.

There were many more beautiful folks in the daily meetings. But these were mine.

I was home.

It was weird, but I kept returning to the dingy room and the cracked cushions on the seats. I drank the bad coffee, with the dried creamer, from the chipped cups.

That March, the pandemic hit and we were told to shelter in place, alone in our homes. I was pretty scared. I had seen the Italians singing to each other on their balconies. I had heard their warnings, their remorse. I went dutifully indoors. I checked the news. I shook my head in amazement at the toilet paper shortage. I waited for my government to set up testing and to provide guidance.

My AA and ACA went on Zoom, but when I called my SIA sponsor, she said, “Come on down to the meeting.”

Stephen was there planting flowers when I arrived. He smiled his gappy grin. He laughed his hoarse laugh. He had a hard time staying sober. But we had been friends in the rooms for years.

I knew not to hug him. I can still remember the last hug I had had: on March 11th at an AA meeting. Les. Before nightfall, I was already afraid one of us would get the other sick.

My sponsor met me at the door with a carton of disinfectant wipes for my hands. Then she gave me a lightweight, clear plastic, strappy gizmo with a cylindrical center full of what looked like dirt.

“Put this on.” It was a mask. “Keep it watered. Report in here tomorrow at 6 a.m. for service work.”

And that is how I learned how the SIA meetings and the quiet garbage collectors were related. The very next day, I was assigned a shift in my neighborhood.

Gloved and masked in mycelium tech, we went about in our competent way, rounding up the city waste for free.

Practical Details

Gaga Garbage

In January 2018, China’s National Sword policy brought the globe into awareness of its waste crisis. Well-intentioned people attempted to quit using plastics. But these measures were no match for a throw away economy where the highest good was too often in conflict with profit. Corporate citizenship had long stunted arguments for social justice and sustainability across all sectors.

A helplessness came over us as we rinsed out our produce bags and refilled them until they frayed and fell apart, landing in the waste basket along with all the plastics we could not avoid. A person could look around her household, or even into her bag and see plastic, plastic, plastic. And a need for more as these fragile items cracked and broke around us.

Companies that had once asked us to put our sorted recyclables into color coded bins on the sidewalks, instead quit collecting glass. Papers were poured into a common bin where they were soaked and polluted with grease and fluids from the other containers. Or paper was bagged in plastic.

Gone were the days when a little girl could smash her dad’s beer cans in an afternoon of cathartic stomping, then take them down to make a bit of cash for a new toy or some candy.

These were just some of the depressing thoughts.

So, when the reader began to speak of garbage, the golden women listened.

For us, it seemed to be a wonderful charitable act that resolved one of the heavy worries we lived with.

A shiny postcard came into our boxes offering garbage and recyclable collection service for a mere $5 a week. And then, as these concerns grew, we began to see all of our waste taken away for free. Bulky, hazardous, green. A fleet of shining, quiet trucks driven by matter of fact, courteous drivers moved in the early mornings through our neighborhoods.

They bought up the landfills too. They encircled them in high fences and, as was their way, quietly stirred dust and gently clattered through the piles.

And, of course there were big corporations and organized crime bosses to negotiate with. But the golden women and their force of close mouthed, diligent drivers and sorters and movers and…whatever else it was they did—well they efficiently addressed the global waste problem.

I am sure it would make an interesting story.

By 2025, we no longer needed to reach into a burlap bag we had bought for bulk oats in order to retrieve a clean produce bag. And frankly, there was a lot more to worry about by then.