#436 Bolus

I hold in my hand a small pillow. It’s roughly symmetrical. Shaped like the wad of food your mouth prepares just before it swallows. Which, if I remember all the way back to high school biology, is called a bolus. This bolus-shaped object I’m now contemplating perhaps contains the avian flu. Perhaps it just contains the fetid air of Detroit. It’s hard to tell. For this thing is an airbag of the type currently used in packaging. These little plasticized puffs have made great inroads into the packing peanuts monopoly as far as shipping aids. In fact, packing peanuts are on the way to excelsior extinction if they don’t come up with some new and catchy marketing thing to tantalize the buying eyes of shipping managers across the country. Let’s see: At Xmas time you could have packing chestnuts. Sometimes you just need cushion along the side of the carton. So maybe some kind of hanging nuts. Yeah, line the walls of the box somehow and call them packing wal-nuts. Or how about something saucy and sexy like packing brazil nuts—you could have Charo as a spokesmodel saying “cushy cushy.” Or how about those little Styrofoam spheres? Drop the nuts and just call them just packing peas. They need to do something because shipping air is so much cheaper than shipping Styrofoam. The packing pillows I’ve seen have come in various sizes. The one I’m currently holding is about the size of a doll pillow. This pillow came in a chain of pillows. All fused together but perforated on the edges so you could only use what you need. Kind of jumbo bubble wrap. The manufacturers name is “Sealed air,” (I’m assuming no marine mammal was involved) and their product name is Fill Air. I went to their website and determined that they actually sell machines so the shipper can fill his own air on site. Sealed Air doesn’t waste a lot of money even shipping air to other shipping departments. Good, shipping shipping materials seems so redundant. Shipping Fill Air pillows across the country would get mighty bulky, if not heavy, and since many of the carriers charge by dimension as well as weight, well, even air can be costly. But the question remains. Whose air and where? Was this box I opened, whose item was nestled in these many bags of air, packed in Detroit or was it packed where they made the damn thing, China? And if it was produced in China from whence came the air? Were they downwind of the avian flu poultry factory? Or perhaps next to the toxic waste dump? Maybe the airpackers were next to the Union Carbide plant over in Vietnam. Or connected to Osama’s biological warfare lab. The point is, I could be holding in my hand a toxic pillow of environmental disaster. A blown-up bolus of bad air, a lofty lozenge of lethality, a personal puff of poison. It’s bad enough China exports everything else. Do they have to pack and ship their air pollution too?
America, ya gotta love it.