The Return of the Bag

If you live in California, you have probably noticed that supermarkets and convenience stores have reverted back to the humble paper bag. With new laws mandating the elimination of single-use plastics, like the cheap, shitty plastic bags they’ve used for years, and the regulations on the thicker reusable bag tightening (these are the ones they charge for), the paper sack has once again become the go-to container for our store-bought goods. 

I don’t know why, but for some reason, I feel a great deal of comfort being given a paper bag. It’s not even for the reasons they are being used, but because it evokes a nostalgia and a return to a time in my life when I didn’t concern myself with such issues as destroying the rainforests, slashing and burning, and all the other horrible things we are doing to the planet.  

The official reason the paper bag has returned is due in part to its compostability and recyclability. These paper bags can be made from post-consumer content and do less damage than the single-use plastic bags that, once disposed of, end up in the sea in a circling trash island the size of Rhode Island.  If we’re lucky, we get to see some of them in YouTube videos being used by people in India who turn them into plastic items such as mats and containers for other useless junk.

I wish I could say I always bring all my reusable plastic bags or cloth tote bags to the store, but I never do.  I always intend to, but it never happens.  In fact, these bags end up in a corner of the kitchen, waiting for a use that never comes. 

Even now, the handled paper bags given out at my local supermarket are folded up neatly and tucked away with others in a single paper bag that I assume is to be kept around in case they are needed by somebody for something.

I’m not a hoarder, but this behavior does make me think of people I have known who live with the sickness of hoarding. I think of the boxes within boxes within boxes that hold neatly stacked Tupperware containers that, when opened, reveal a tomb of neatly stacked condiment packets, separated by size and type. 

Somebody somewhere is bound to need these at some undetermined time and place in the future.  That time and place are useless, however, because no one is going to remember their existence when the time comes. 

My tightly stuffed paper bag of paper bags is harmless, I know, but the older I get, the more I realize that all the shit I have accumulated over the years will be of no use to anyone.  I’m not talking about bags, which are in and of themselves a useful invention. No, I’m talking about books, clothes, computers, and knick-knacks. So much junk in my life. All of it, circling the airport in a holding pattern, never to land and realize its true purpose or destiny. 

Nothing in life is permanent. 

After thirteen years in my West Hollywood apartment, I was forced to move back home, and all of my belongings were put into storage. It was a lot of stuff. A lot. It was a ten-by eleven-foot unit with a very high ceiling, and I can tell you it was stuffed to the gills. 

For over ten years, I paid for that storage unit, and I can count on one hand the number of times I went to visit the facility. My entire life, in a room, and none of it was necessary for my day-to-day life.

When a three-alarm fire that barreled for 12 hours straight burned my unit and all its belongings to the ground, I felt nothing. That’s not entirely true. I felt relieved that I no longer had to pay the $265 a month to keep the unit rented. 

Over time, I mourned the loss of the more sentimental items.  Boxes of correspondence letters I wrote in the eighties and nineties, the thousands of books, cds, and movies.  All gone, and there was nothing I could do about it. 

In fact, the fire was the result of arson, but the fire department and the police were unable to find the culprit who started it. I was more upset about the general lack of empathy I received from the owners of the storage facility than the fire itself. 

Now, several years on from that disaster, it all seems like the universe was telling me something I refused to accept.  That a part of my life was over, and now there is something new.  This moment.  The here and now. 

That’s ultimately what the return to the paper bag has indicated for me.  A return to the present moment. A highly compostable, recyclable moment that is ephemeral in nature and will not last, even if you shove it neatly into a bag filled with other bags.