Recovered Researcher Journal

Tuesday 3 of Juno 212

Dear diary,

I found myself asking "where does waste go?"

So I met a guy at an e-waste facility that said something that stuck with me.
"Time is really linear for us", he confessed full of confidence and ego.
It made me both sad and angry.

That phrase set the tone for the rest of his monologue; he tried to convince me that their way of handling waste is the best, the only way.

“Well, no one wants to live next to a furnace that burns metal, plastic, and whatever else we throw away” he said, treating it as a very convenient argument that comforts him at night.
“So we send most of it to China. We don’t have the infrastructure here in Europe”, he explained.
We don’t have the will either, I thought. Maybe it’s easier not to see what we’ve set on fire.

I was shown a very green route that waste goes through.
The horrors were just lurking in between the words i heard.
"We burn the plastic for heat", he said.
"We do it locally", he reassured us.
But i heard something else hiding between his words:
We burn it here not because it is right, but because there is no other way to ship it elsewhere in a cheap way. So we learned to find a purpose in the flames. We burn plastic so it will comfort ourselves with heat and electricity.

We should be grateful for the warmth and the light.
But the air? the air scorns us.
She curses every transformation of plastic we force upon her. plastic turns into particles that settle into the air. That air will travel. Not in a linear way but it will go around, loop, drift, circle and cycle. She will remind us that the plastic is us and we are the plastic.

waste does not vanish.
Sometimes it's out of sight.
But it always finds a way back.

Monday 14 of Apples 345678

Dear diary,

After i visited the e-waste facility i found myself asking the question:
" What happens when we refuse linear time as we know it?"

Today I wanted to look at how i could understand the concept of time, broadly speaking. I realized i need to turn off the faucet of all the time structures i am trapped in. work time, agenda's, schedules, family plans, bookings, train delays, spoons in my brain, circadian cicadas that monitor my sleep. even my hair is entangled is this awful project we call time.
Maybe i don't want to understand time at all. Maybe that is the 'aha!' we all need. We should not try to understand something that is not made to be contained, tracked, kept, exploited.
But what other options do we have? go with the flow? what flow? how do we know we will flow well?

Monday 7 of Times divided by anguish

Dear diary,

Today i found myself asking the question:
"if marxists that lost their lives in different timelines are still entrapped in the air we breath today, why is it so that we cannot get rid of the neo-capitalist project that is sucking our time into the pipe of economical growth and soul degrowth?"

Today i only had time to come up with a long and unsolvable question. it makes me despair that a thing such as time can be used in a way we lose all the good times we could have.

I did find a picture of some cool time keeping constructions, i am only sad they were used to make sure people got to work on time.

to counter these thoughts, perhaps i should try to be late to work more often..

Monday 34 of anti-selfcare-day

Dear diary,

I found a microscope today and thought it would be fun to try searching for time in some oddly peculiar places. I found some trash on the side of the road and it was so impressive that i decided to take it home to inspect.

Since it was so much and my brain was sparkling with curiosity, i cancelled all my work-related plans and called some friends over. Only those who don't care for their 9 to 5 jobs decided to show up. They even brought some anti-self-care baskets! in those you can typically find some dream circle stories, some olive oil and bread to share and of course some stones and minerals to connect to the cosmic forces.

Anyway, we decided to sit around and look deeply into the trash through the microscope. There, we saw many things, veins of quartz, worms leaving their trademarks, vulture scratches, permanently melted plastic sludges.

Images we made with the microscope