Pages

Thursday, April 1, 2010

A black hole in disguise

If there were a Journal of the American Academy of Clutter-Control Science, I’d feel compelled to file a report on the gravitational pull of that ramen-noodle box that’s been recommissioned as a plastic shopping-bag container.

It looks like an ordinary noodle box. But if you peer through the tear in the plastic cover, you can see a tightly compressed stack of neatly folded plastic shopping bags inside. Outside the container, where the usual laws of clutter physics apply, those bags would explode into an unwieldy mountain of airy nothing that would quickly scatter to the ends of the earth. Instead, they’ve been sucked into a deceptive black hole.

And it wants more. It sits there in the pantry, thrumming, sending out search-party signals that are somehow programmed through my eyeballs, seeking more and more and more. And its finding them: Crumpled plastic bags in the garage, the back of the van, the furnace closet. Only last week I averted my eyes, seemingly blind to their creeping presence. Now, once detected, they have no chance of escape. The awesome appetite of

No comments: