I WANT TO KNOW...

The last thing I do before leaving the house on Sunday morning is swipe my nails with clear fingernail polish. I don't have to remove last weeks polish--it's magically gone. Where did it go? Did it chip off, one bit at a time; did it wear off in minute particles? I never saw any of it go; it’s just gone. Surely I’m not the only one this happens to. There must be pounds and pounds of the stuff, flaking or wearing off all over America. Maybe hundreds of pounds of the stuff. Where does it go?

Which leads me to wondering about pencil led—the kind that go in mechanical pencils. When you are down to the last little bit it has to be discarded. How many thousands of pounds of pencil led are discarded each day in America? Where does it go?

Which leads me to wondering about diapers. Wet ones. Those are tossed into the garbage every day, full of water—okay, yellow water but you get my point. Diapers are made to hold the yellow water so how much water is put into landfills every day that stays there? A pond full? Several ponds full? A lake’s worth? Global warming could occur and the seas won’t rise because we’re busy tying up water in diapers that we throw away and that stay on land. Forever.

Which leads me to wondering about people who dig around in landfills. They do this so they can find out what the people were doing, eating, wearing in days gone by. Why didn't someone just keep a record? Wouldn't it be simpler, and certainly cleaner, to just look up the records of a tomato cannery. That way they'd know that people were eating more prepared spaghetti sauce instead of making spaghetti sauce from scratch using canned tomato sauce. Surely someone has records of how many bottles or cans of each kind of product was sold. I think people like to dig in landfills. They want to find buried treasure. Okay, the buried treasure is moldy stuff and rusted stuff but it fulfills they unresolved pirate desires. So, it's a bunch of pirate wannabe's who call themselves some fancy name and get a government grant to dig around in other people's trash. 'They are going to find a lot of diapers, that's for sure.

Which leads me to wondering about those lost civilizations. How does that happen? Homes that people built are covered over and new ones are built on top of them. Do the people in the original homes not realize that their town is being buried? Hello! Wouldn’t you notice if your house were slowly being covered with dirt—and maybe flakes of fingernail polish and pencil led—and then wouldn’t you get out the trusty wheel barrow—or whatever those ancient civilizations used—and haul that dirt away, dumping it in a gully somewhere?

When archeologists stop the local drain-pipe-workers from putting in a new drainage system because they discovered an ancient city built twenty feet down doesn’t anyone wonder why the original city was covered over? Did it happen so slowly that the original people didn't notice they were up to their ankles in dirt? Then up to their knees? Did the wife say to her husband, "This house is just getting too hard to dust. Let's cover it over and build a new one on top." This makes no sense to me.

Which leads me to wonder about Stonehenge and those large bodiless heads on Easter Island. How come no one remembers why they are there or how they got there? Did all the Mom's get together one day and say something like, "We're tired of answering all these pesky questions. Let's not tell the kids about the heads in the wheat field. If we don't say anything maybe they won't notice. If they do ask let's pretend we don't hear them." Maybe they stuck their fingers in their ears and sang, "Waltzing Matilda" when the kids said, "Hey Mom, why are those big stones in a circle?" Maybe the mom's said, "Ask your dad," and he was off pillaging some other town and by the time he got home the kids forgot to ask because they were so bummed that Dad didn't remember to bring souvenirs and so they went into their bedrooms and sulked. Maybe that's why they didn't notice the dirt up to their ankles.

These things are puzzling to me. If I happen to be awake in the middle of the night its questions like this give me something to do.