by Ethan Gilsdorf
This morning, flattened like roadkill in front of my house, post-trash and recycling pickup day, its plastic sleeve displaying the logo and “best by” and “bottled on” date long since stripped and taken by the wind, the 8 a.m. sunshine catching one of its crumpled diamond facets refracting the light back to me, not unbeautiful for a Monday.
A week earlier, snatched by a middle-aged man from a carton of other 16.9 ouncers, likely a cheap grocery store brand, and stored on the bottom shelf of the fridge before being consumed in one gulp the first day of a maiden jog after a well-intentioned pledge to “finally run that 5K,” the empty plastic bottle in his hand inducing some guilt, Why didn’t I drink a glass of water?
A month earlier, liberated by a boxcutter from a pallet of Jenga-stacked boxes and shrinkwrap, slammed onto the shelf in aisle 18, “Bottled water,” one 12 pack at a time by Ronaldo (aka “The Ronmeister”) working the night shift, his eighth straight shift in a row, because one of his kids goes to community college and the other one wants to be a nurse and $18.00 an hour don’t cut it.
Four months earlier, after being hauled among hundreds of pallets cross-country, unloaded from a tractor trailer by JoEllen, who never imagined on the night of her junior prom she’d be driving a forklift for 17 years (she wanted to be a dancer), who gently, delicately places the pallet in its lonely place in a distribution center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Seven months earlier, filled and ordered and capped and shuttled and labeled by a Rube Goldberg gizmo of conveyor belts and spinning contraptions, thousands per day, hundreds of thousands per week, the “spring water” inside each one of unknown provenance and questionable quality but branded as a mashup of syllables evoking mountain/geyser/alpine/valley/fresh/glacier/water/ice/volcano– Glacier Vale, MontVolcAlp, IceCano, Wettr, Gaysir, FreySsshhhh. You get the joke.
One year earlier, concocted from Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) pellets, plasticized, melted, injected into molds, run through an unscrambler, fed into a blow molding machine, heated and stretched into bottle shapes, the process squinted over by lab-jacketed engineers with helmets keeping tabs on transparency, gloss, shatter resistance, thickness, and pressure resistance, but not the future, the plastic’s longevity, eternity.
Even earlier, the bottle was born from mountains of PET pellets the offspring of some unholy alchemy of petroleum hydrocarbons, polymerization of ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid under the influence of chemical catalysts, forced through molten and viscous states, then solidified, creating long molecular chains, apparently the best kinds of chains for plastic bottles.
Some time before that, an insane chemist like the kid who always aced his tests in Mr. Perry’s class figured out how to conjure ethylene glycol, a colorless liquid from ethylene (H2C=CH2) (itself a colorless, sweet and musky-smelling flammable gas made from “steam cracking” hydrocarbons and steam) and terephthalic acid, a crystalline solid obtained from xylene (C6H4(CH3)2) (itself an isomeric dimethylbenzene obtained from coal-tar distillate and petroleum). Have I lost you yet? I almost failed chemistry. Sorry, Mr. Perry.
At the same time, somewhere else on the planet, a place with a questionable environmental record, coal-tar distillate—a blackstrap molasses-colored goop from steel production, seemingly useless—emerged from the pyrolytic process of destructive distillation of coal tar in a coke oven, after reaching 1,000°C in an oxygen-limited condition, its large molecules cracked, shattered, defeated, given up. Don’t give up, molecules. You still have value.
And also, elsewhere, a yellowish-black liquid cocktail, aka petroleum, was extracted from ancient mixtures of hydrocarbons—gas, liquid, solid— that occur on Planet Earth thanks to the detritus of dead organisms entombed in mud and silt that sit there, quiet as a stopped watch, becoming sedimentary rock after being squashed by heat and pressure and time. Which equals fossil fuels. Our doom.
Millions of years earlier, zooplankton and algae passed on, their purpose complete and fulfilled, they thought—I know they don’t think, but in this story they do—and they drifted down and settled in stagnant sea and lake bottoms, dreaming of the ancient gods, their afterlife. They waited, drinking nutrients from murky pools, unaware they’d be resurrected eons later, that their bodies and matter, their very molecules, would be reborn to slake the disposable thirst of this disposable human.

Ethan Gilsdorf is a memoirist, essayist, critic, journalist, poet, teacher, performer, and the author of the award-winning memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Boston Globe, Wired, Salon, O the Oprah Magazine, National Geographic, Brevity, Electric Literature, Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Southern Review, North American Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other publications. Twice his work has been named “Notable” by The Best American Essays. He teaches creative writing at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the 10-month Essay Incubator program, and is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University. He also leads writing workshops for non-profit social justice organizations and has taught at Louisiana State University, Emerson College, and for LitArts RI. A former editor for Frank magazine and New Delta Review, Gilsdorf is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize. He presented the TEDx talk “Why Dungeons & Dragons is Good for You (In Real Life)” and has appeared on NPR, The Discovery Channel, PBS, CBC, BBC; and in the documentary Revenge of the Geeks. More info: ethangilsdorf.com.