This morning I woke in the same place and in the same way I wake every morning; I woke 25 feet above the earth in my bed. I am covered by mass-produced, mass-marketed blankets and pillows made by the same machine in the same exact way that millions of others have been made. My bed has four dark brown glossy wooden posts with metal posts running to and from these four posts. These hold a mattress made, by machines, no differently than thousands of other twin size mattresses. I roll over, the sun has been up for hours it seems, I look over and look at my cell phone, it tells me that it’s 9:30am. I sit up; my feet are now on that same kind of glossy wood that the bed is made out of. I stretch and to my left I turn and look through the glass panes that separate me from the outside. This is my natural routine, but today this seems to be such an unnatural experience. Unnatural in an artificial way and in discord with nature. I wonder: What makes those posters so glossy, the walls so white, the time on the cell phone so accurate? I stand up, these thoughts running through my mind and start pulling on a shirt when I stop half way? Who picked the cotton for this shirt? Most likely a machine I think but then stop again. Who made it into thread, wove the thread, sewed the cloth into a “medium” sized shirt? A machine probably did most of it. If not, human tee-shirt making machines, standing in assembly lines, working in the unnatural conditions of a factory did all the other work. This isn’t quite the satisfactory answer I’d like to give myself, but I feel it’s the truth. This piece of realization makes me feel more attached to a plastic world than ever.

I grab my wallet and pull open my glossy dark brown door and enter into the outside world. I am walking to the grocery store; I notice the houses crammed next to one each other. Each one has a different shade of tope or gray painted onto venial siding meant to look like wood. Each one has its own mailbox, slab of concrete, and small square of grass. And even in suburbia, I see the animalistic tendencies in humans. Like lions, bears, and other predators, humans need their own space. If I were to intrude into a lion’s hunting ground, I’d probably have my throat ripped off. If I were to intrude into some human’s home and refuse to leave I’d probably hear some profanity along with the general message of “get off my property before I call the police.” In both scenarios an animal is defending his territory.