Plastic Smile

Plastic, if you care, used to be a new word. Imagine, the stuff that would form the basis of a society egalitarian in wealth because anyone can afford a plastic chair, a plastic table, a plastic car, a plastic door, a plastic tablecloth, a plastic sofa, a plastic couch, and a plastic bedsheet for a plastic bed.

But somewhere along the way, the novelty dried up, and people were invariably disappointed in their search for a utopia of luxurious living.

So then the music came, starting somewhen in the 50's and continuing to present day, the lyrics of despair describing a "plastic smile" with a "plastic face," dreaming of a "plastic house" with a "plastic fence," decorating the "plastic plants," and smelling the "plastic flowers," writing "plastic card," with "plastic words" and a "plastic pen." And in the pictures that you see of years and years ago, such a "plastic show" of happiness hiding an argument, a quarrel, a disappointment, a time when bitterness simmered once.

So this is American life: So this is progress. No wonder then, we sometimes look like we have regressed; but really, we are merely holding together what should be separated by time and space. Between the vast and lonely landscape of the old wilderness of millions of years and the vast metropolitan skyscrapers not much more than two hundred years old (compared to Rome, Florence, Baghdad, Beijing that hold the influence of millennia) that speak to our sense of a new civilization, we merely are panicking that we have reached the limits of our soul-degrading technologies, of our disconnection from society, and yet where else could we go . . . when we have no past? So stuck in the moving present we remain, our days passing us but we cannot hold our past or our future together, and we are met with ourselves.

Now, Halloween is coming up soon, and I, who ignored it last year, am readying to enjoy the quaint remembrance of childhood and fantasy of ghosts, witches, vampires, and ministers of good and evil clashed. I feel the chill of the midnight hours when All Saints' Day and the most Hallowed Eve remind us of the wonders of the heaven we never understand yet feel strongly guided by. Can you feel the ghost? Can you feel the magic? Can you imagine the horror? Maybe it's time I face myself again, and see if I don't feel once the dementia of existentialism.