Putrifaction

These are pictures of the two paper mills that face each other across the river that is the border between International Falls, U.S., and Canada. The smell is worse than anything I have ever inhaled, worse than mildew, worse than sulfur, bloated tampons, cat shit, really. Maybe it is not objectively worse than those smells, if it was contained in one room or temporary, but it fills the whole sky. It invades your car with the windows closed, you cannot escape it.

Many people in I'Falls and Canada work in the paper mills, and once I tried to write a fiction novel that opened with a father who worked in the American one, but the story turned into me, because the factory worker was getting fired and went home to kill himself, and I happened to have lately been fired and feeling quite low. The story never took off, and mine never do. I simply can't make things up. They have to be real.

So here, these pictures are real (really boring probably) but I want you to see them and imagine the smell and think about ways that you can conserve paper. Because really the putrid smell is one of trees dying, trees that are the most beautiful, common creations left from God and will not be around forever since human beings are determined to use everything up as quickly as possible.

And as you probably noticed, there the river is frozen and there is snow on the ground! Hello I'm in the coldest place in all of the United States! It's exceptionally warm this year though, not twenty below as it has been some years past, but a mild thirty degrees or so..........which brings me to global warming. Basically the earth will not be around much longer, anyone with a brain and paying attention realizes that. But do you also realize how much of the earth is already gone and dead forever? Once it contained and was home to so many species and plants and animals that have been destroyed and can never come back.

And I think it's interesting, the difference in perspective between the living and the dead. I often think how movies are great because they choose a perspective for us. I can't explain this thought yet, but it's something like this: each person is a microcosm (Mischa's favorite word) of the whole picture. Now, if one person dies, hasn't all of reality died really? Except there are survivors, for whom life and earth etc are still real. The future is real to me, and important, since I am still alive. But if I die, nothing is important anymore. What if the most important people and animals have already lived and died? This world, with it's diminishing forests, growing populations and diseases............this is just residue.