Another plastic rant...

I stood in the gardening aisle of our local hyper-market looking glassily at the rows of various sized buddhas and Easter Island heads, all made of plastic or resin - the same thing pollution wise I imagine. Duly took a picture so I could write this post and then found another absurdity which somewhat trumped (ugh, still difficult to use that word) plastic deities, (and I may well have ranted about such items before). In the pet section while looking for a bag of dog rice I noticed the area of dog toys/dog grooming, dog crossword books, etc, in which was probably the clearest message that humans have certain reached the point of stupidity beyond belief. 

lavender, rose and lemon flavoured dog poo bags

Dog waste bags . . . fair enough. I'd rather pick our dogs' poops up with a large leaf if available and hide it under a bush, but if one is in a city centre with no foliage of a usable size within reach, then, yes, poo bags, good. BUT, rose, lavender or lemon scented plastic bags . . . with appropriate colour coordination. Come on! Really? 

Imagine the product meeting on that one . . . 

'So, Barry, you're thinking colour . . . Like it, liking it! Appealing to the feminine middle age demographic? What about blokes - should we consider a more . . . powerful bag - explosions, car chases, war . . . thinking, silver, maybe sport orientated? Football team colours? Black? Oh, they exist . . . okay. iPhone shaped dispenser? Gun shaped?' 

At the other end of the spectrum, or at at least in that emporium, were the 100 percent bio degradable, eco-friendly, packaged in cardboard with a friendly poo illustration, versions. They are even organic. Seems a little excessive, unless you were planning on eating them. To my mind, these really should be the only ones offered, and it would give more space to buddhas and Easter Island heads.

Ever-changing human emotions

Funny, isn't it.
You can wake up feeling perhaps mildly optimistic, or very optimistic, or miserable, or full of anger, then throughout the course of a day depending on conversations, emails, the weather, a new scratch on the car, a dog poo in the wrong place; someone giving you an unexpected present, a packet of tea discovered at the back of a cupboard when you thought you had run out, an incredible cloud, a good lunch, new socks, etc, etc and everything changes for better or worse, until the next boring/fun/extraordinary/necessary/ life-changing or one step closer to death, thing that happens to alter your mood during this particular twenty-four hours.
Or maybe some people don't experience this - are always, or mostly always on a course of, 'yep, okay-ness' or everything being constantly a uniform grey, or extreme positiveness always. . . how exhausting.
Real depression is crippling, and I'm lucky to only experience perhaps a day a month where I feel 'Well, shit . . ." and also lucky in the knowledge that tomorrow I'll feel 'normal', whatever my normal-ness is - mostly optimistic in a muddling along sort of a way.
So, today was a patchwork of emotions with a dip in the early afternoon heading towards 'Well, shit . . . but saved by the kind and genuinely helpful words of a good friend.
The mouldy mood had stemmed from feeling that I might be wasting my time trying to get published (something that is moving forward, glacially). I was preparing for full sky-dive into Well, shit . . ." when an email arrived from the friend who had finished the book in question (and has helped me a great deal with editing over a couple of years). Constructive praise ending in 'congratulations' and from someone I know would always tell me if something needed fixing, blew the dismal mood away. I sauntered into the garden with shears and attacked bushes that had needed serious trimming for weeks, gazed up at clouds and generally felt that the world, at least within my own personal compound, was and is a good place.