I don’t know about you, but I wake up every morning — grab a cup of coffee, walk the dog — and register amazement at just how many things I could rant about, how many things are so deeply crazy I could spend all day dabbing at the foam around the corners of my mouth and bemoaning the barely Cro-Magnon state of some of the world.

I mean, here’s a quick re-hash of the past month:

A Republican Congressman shunned by his own family for being a vile idiot posts an anime of himself stabbing a congressional colleague in the neck.

A Republican congresswoman is caught — twice — telling (and gilding) a likely entirely bogus story of her confronting a congressional colleague as “a terrorist sympathizer.”

A former “60 Minutes” correspondent, long since dismissed for fabricating a story about the Benghazi incident pops up on FoxNews — where she is currently employed — comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele.

And here in Minnesota, St. Paul cops, allegedly hired to protect the public, are playing the Joe Rogan/Tucker Carlson “personal choice” card in the context of refusing to vaccinate themselves — to avoid spreading a contagious, deadly disease to that same public, i.e. the people who employ them and pay their salaries.

I mean … it just goes on and on … . Where do you start, if you choose to start at all? Sadly, like many people I talk to these days, the post-Trump moment, this interregnum we’re in, isn’t providing the necessary respite from the exhaustion of the Orange God King’s constant vulgar grifting. People want to forget about all the stupidity, racism, fraud and shame and “get back to normal.” Except that “normal”, when Christmas shopping, football and “The Bachelorette” could fully consume our attention, keeps back-drifting off toward the horizon.

Which explains why I just want to say something about … plastic.

Yesterday, there was this story in The Washington Post, reporting on a long-in-development congressional survey of plastic consumption/production.

“The United States contributes more to this deluge than any other nation, according to the analysis, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person. Overall, the United States produced 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — almost twice as much as China, and more than the entire European Union combined.”

TWICE AS MUCH AS … CHINA.

Since I became deeply obsessed with plastic a couple years ago, and I began regularly filling a (plastic) bag with all the plastic wrappings we accumulate every day, I haven’t stopped being amazed at the beach ball-sized glob of plastic waste the two of us here at La Casa Lambert accumulate in a given week.

And worse, I’ve become convinced that our recycling efforts are largely illusory. (“Plastics accounted for 12 percent of the 292 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in the U.S. in 2018, totaling some 35.7 million tons. However, the volume of plastic waste recycled in the U.S. that year was 3.1 million tons, giving a recycling rate of just 8.7 percent. Nov 22, 2021.”)

Probably once a week I stroll through Costco — one of the more enlightened major retailers — and stare at water, bottled in plastic, swaddled by the case in another layer of plastic and then wrapped together on shipping pallets in yet another layer of plastic.

Water.

Here’s a petition you can sign to tell Costco they can do a lot better than they’re doing in terms of wrapping everything they sell — from water to bananas to socket wrenches — in plastic. (Usually I doubt any big company will give this a second thought. But Costco has demonstrated a heightened interest in civic-minded retailing in the past.)

Among the crazy, socialist ideas for weaning ourselves off plastic — 287 pounds per American, per year! — is … buying less. How about fixing or restoring what you already have? (It’s insanity, I know.) Screw keeping up with the fashion of the minute. Use what you’ve already got. Instead of complaining about how Biden has clogged up the ports so bad you can’t get all that plastic/plastic-wrapped Chinese Christmas crap out off ships floating outside LA and Long Beach.

Anyway, before I take a deep breath and plunge back in to the flaming sewer hole of conservative America, where a conscientious scientist is compared to a Nazi mass murderer because … he wants to stop a pandemic that has already killed 750,000 Americans … I had to cough up the plastic twine ball logged in my throat.