I Know Why The Petroleum Stores Wane

Here's why gas prices soar and oil supplies drop: The Devil's Playground gives work to wasteful hands.

Petroleum is used to make plastics, you know. Including those plastic bags that nobody wants, the plastic bags whose only redeeming quality is being just the right size to be used as liners in small wastebaskets.

Remember the days of the paper sack? Made from trees? Trees which are sustainable energy, growing back in a human lifetime, replanted by the timber industry as they harvest the big 'uns. Paper sacks that could be used to conceal the identity of the Unknown Comic. Used as art paper for kids with crayons. Used to create a fringed vest for a kid in a Thanksgiving play. Used as a container for home-popped popcorn to take to the family drive-in for a Disney double-feature like Mary Poppins and The Three Lives of Thomasina.

I made a brief stop at The Devil's Playground today, for an abbreviated food stock-up. My items would have fit into three bags. However...the 20-items-or-less checker insisted on using four, and double-bagging my purchases. She must have some form of OCD where these plastic bags are concerned. In addition, each pair of bags enclosing my groceries had an unopened bag attached. A flat freeloader, a svelte sidecar, a tag-a-long little brother, a plastic parasite.

My take-home plastic bag tally was 12. For items that would have fit into three bags.

This is why we can't have cheap petroleum-based things.