Million year old glue

Thursday, March 7, 2024

You know how plastic will be in the landfill forever (or thousands or millions of years) before it degrades? I know. I have heard it often.

I went to the desk to get glue, to reseal a letter, to return-to-sender it. I tampered with mail (I have also heard often that that is a federal offense, but my sister made me do it. She said just do it and I did). We got a letter addressed to the Holiday Gas Station at our address from the Eagan (a town a few towns over) Fire department. I was going to send it back, in case it was important. Donna said I was making the post office redo junk mail. That seemed a waste of the post office’s time. So, I opened it (she said) to make sure it was junk mail. It was not junk mail. Or was it? I don’t know. It said the Holiday Gas station should recently have gotten a letter (actually it said Feb. 25, 2023, which was not recently, but I assume that was an error and they meant 2024) saying that their private fire hydrant needed to be certified, but they were correcting that in saying that IF they had a private fire hydrant if MIGHT need to be certified. If the Holiday Gas station thought it should be certified, they could call a number. Seems pretty wishy-washy to me, but I do not want to stand in the way of the Holiday Gas station (which is not located at my address) deciding about their fire hydrant, if, indeed, they have one. So, I went and got the glue.

I unscrewed the little orange cap and squeezed, and I crushed the whole thing. I didn’t even squeeze hard, because I didn’t need much glue. The whole plastic bottle is so brittle you just touch it and it crumbles. It really has been a while since I needed glue, I guess. I immediately took it up to the kitchen counter and started crushing it. What fun. I got quite gluey, the counter got quite gluey, the dishcloth then got quite gluey. Because I must have grown up during the Depression, I spatula-ed out all the glue into a little recycled take-out container. The spatula got quite gluey. It was quite a thing.