The Return(s)

      It's that time of year when retailers, many of whom glossed over Thanksgiving & Halloween, anticipate that people will feel obligated to wrap and buy and celebrate...and then return.  The "industry" of returned goods is exactly that, an industry; Christmas returns alone are estimated to cost retailers $300 billion, something glaringly brought to light in a piece in The New Yorker.  Imagine that you're Amazon or Costco or Target and the returns begin to arrive...as in a trillion dollars worth overall.  For many retailers, these items will return pennies on the dollar, if anything at all (most are sent to be destroyed, even if new).  Anything bought and returned is no longer new and generally cannot be put back on the shelf, which is okay if you are large retailer such as Walmart and able to absorb such losses (Walmart now accounts for over 25% of all grocery purchases); but what if you're a small or middle-sized store?  A few dozen, hundred, or thousand returns and you may find your balance sheet seriously depleted.  But then, customers are customers, and unfortunately, many have learned that it's easy to order something in several sizes to see which one fits better, then just return the others.  Shipping them back is free, after all, at least to the customer (retailers tend to eventually add those return costs into the price of their goods; and the days of free shipping may be quickly coming to a close, reported Business Week).

     And then there was another return, that of my wife and I being back in Las Vegas.  This would likely become our last visit for awhile, if not forever.  We both could feel it...we had simply outgrown Vegas to put it politely; or rather the crowd Vegas seemed to want to attract was far younger than us.  Things were overly bright (perhaps due to the switch to LEDs which allowed more lighting), more ostentatious (such as female street hawkers openly displaying their breasts and dressed as nuns), and  outdoor "music" that was being broadcast much, much louder.  So loud that despite us being placed on the "quiet" side of the hotel, and on an upper floor, the music still vibrated our closed windows.  And being Vegas, we knew that this was something which wouldn't end until the wee hours.  Here are some foam earplugs, the hotel politely told us when we went back down (they didn't work).  We changed rooms to the other side.  Turns out that the blasting music was coming from a private wedding down the road, one which had started at 4:30 in the afternoon (or so the hotel told us).  It was 9:30 when we changed rooms and the music was still going on (no idea how loud it must have been inside the wedding building, although such sustained noise at that level --especially true in nightclubs which are also enclosed-- causes permanent ear damage after 40 minutes).  Outside on the street it was little better, the deep pounding of the bass speakers filling every crack and crevice of the five-block area (you could feel the sound on your chest).  So big deal, you say, it was Vegas.  And there was a time when we did find the crowds and the noise exciting (the young hotel staff admitted that the street volume had increased over the past few years).  But that was nearly ten years ago, a time when we would bring our moms.  We didn't see any moms this time, at least none in their 80s, which was our moms' ages when they not only joined us but looked forward to going.  It was also a time when there was quite a variety of machines to play, a time now long gone.  As a brief search on the internet will reveal, the machines of even a few years ago didn’t provide enough of a return to the casinos.  No more sit time picking "doors" or pressing bonus buttons on the screen...just keep it moving son.  Which may be why the music was so amped up, to keep the crowds moving.

     I couldn't help but think of the book I had just finished, 33 Ways of Looking at An Elephant, a collection of tales compiled by Dale Peterson.  Rather amazing creatures, one of the stories wrote, when the Probosicidea order emerged 60 billion years ago as "the Wild Animal of Moeris."  Said the piece: The pig-sized fossilized animals would genetically evolve into 8 families, 38 genera, and more than 160 species of trunked and tucked creatures who became dominating inhabitants on every continent except Antarctica and Australia...We can experience them in the waking reality of the present.  But they are going fast.  For most people in most parts of the world, they are already gone.  They are no longer present in the wild or part of the reality of people's daily lives, represented today pathetically by a few isolated prisoners in zoos and circuses, remembered dreamily in a database iconography as winsome Dumbos and Jumbos.  Was that now my wife and I in Vegas, isolated as distant representatives by a wild and crazy place?

     In another story, acoustic biologist Katy Payne, who started by studying the sounds of humpback whales, shifted her interest to those on land, a communication she termed "infrasonic."  Her studies would go on to show elephants: ...capable of receiving infrasound from a source four kilometers away, which means that the infrasound calls could cover at least fifty square kilometers.  Under ideal atmospheric conditions, so it was later calculated, such calls might travel for up to 9.8 kilometers (more than six miles) and be heard by elephants within an area of around 300 square kilometers.  She would go on to write: Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wind, thunder, and ocean storms --gigantic motions of earth, air, fire, and water-- these are the main sources of infrasound, sound below the range of human hearing, which travels huge distances through rock, water, and air...Is that what I was feeling as I sat beside elephant cage?  Sound too low for me to hear, yet so powerful it caused the air to throb?   For my wife and I, we could feel the air throb when out in the downtown Vegas street, but it certainly wasn't from elephants.

     Speaking of elephants and whales, I also felt sad about the amount of waste, not only in food (although for the most part, the buffets of old are long gone) but in plastic.  Since I tend to wake up several hours ahead of my wife while in Vegas, I often head down for a coffee and a quick nibble in the wee hours.  And while I told the McDonald's worker that I would eat my order there, I watched as it was all packed up with so much plastic: single-use, individually wrapped plastic ware, wrapped syrup, wrapped butter, all put into a paper bag which was then placed into an even larger plastic bag. Recycle?  None available.  And the hotel was little different; while housecleaning is now only for guests staying longer than 4 days, each room could ask for more bottled water daily (which we did).  Here's our old plastic bottles, we told housekeeping, only to be told to just toss them in the trash...and here are your new bottles.  Wrote a piece in The New York Review: Plastic is attractive to whales.  It looks like food, and indeed when eaten gives a sensation if fullness, but offers no nutrition.  And it simply stays in the digestive tract until eventually there is no room for actual food.  One emaciated Cuvier's beaked whale who washed up dead on a beach in the Philippines had died of starvation.  Inside the animal's stomach, researchers found eighty-eight pounds of plastic trash, including bags, cups, and other single-use items.

     And then there was another discovery about the elephant population..a series of.mysterious deaths.  350 in Botswana alone.   No wounds, no tusks missing.  Botswana felt that it may have been algae toxicity in the water, but vultures eating the carcasses were unaffected.  Turns out that it was something much smaller, wrote National Geographic: Bisgaard taxon 45  (a bacterium not previously found in elephants of any species, called Bisgaard taxon 45, that causes a massive systemic blood infection called septicemia) is related to another bacterium, called Pasteurella multocida, that can cause septicemia in cattle and was linked to the death of 200,000 endangered saiga antelope in Kazakhstan in 2015.  Yet while it shares many of the same lethal genes, Bisgaard taxon 45 is a separate species...Scientists don't know how widespread Bisgaard taxon 45 is, or if the bacteria exist as normal flora within elephants and other animals.  People bit by captive lions and tigers in the U.S. and U.K. have contracted the bacteria.  Scientists have also recorded it in a pet chipmunk in Germany and in healthy captive parrots.  Wait, bacteria?  Return to the previous post and you read about how bacteria merged with archaea, a once in 4-billion year event which has never been repeated and one which led to elephants, us humans, and basically all life as we now know it.  Here's what physicist Brian Cox had to say in his book, Wonders of Life: Bacteria have been around for almost the entire history of life on Earth...A single drop of water contains, on average, a million bacteria, a gram of soil may be home to 40 million; in your body there are ten times as many bacteria as there are human cells.  It is estimated that there are currently around 1031 [10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000] bacteria alive on Earth -- a hundred million times the number of stars in the observable Universe.  By mass, they are comfortably the dominant organisms on our planet.  A somewhat related small single-cell parasite making its return is malaria (of the 156 varieties of the genus Plasmodium, 4 affect humans); just 16 years from now it is estimated that 5 billion people could be at risk of contacting it, wrote The Week (cases have already been reported in Texas, Florida and Maryland).

     Certain things can't return, of course, which perhaps included those times we remembered, that saying of "you can't go back."  The times when our moms and my brother joined us, like them, have now passed.  Vegas then was a fun time, a family time of sorts, at least for us.  And perhaps we were simply missing those times; perhaps Vegas hadn't actually changed at all but that we had.  Of course, Vegas did just have Grand Prix cars race through the Strip, and hosted the National Finals Rodeo, the largest rodeo event in the U.S. and one which attracted rodeo professionals from around the world, or so said our cab driver.  Jump ahead a few months from now and the Super Bowl would arrive.  And you've probably read about The Sphere, a giant (at least to us) orb that has been getting a lot of publicity but is losing about $400 million a year so far (tickets for a 50-minute "movie" about our planet were $170...or "just" $80 at a last-minute discount rate, far out of our price range; The Sphere uses enough electricity to power 21,000 homes daily).  

     So perhaps this was all the future --or the present-- and it was just moving along.  Rather than being in the parade (do those still happen?) I was now standing on the sidelines watching it.  Dave Holmes wrote in Esquire: I have at least three pieces of wearable tech on my body at all times, and AI has come for my job.  But the most insidious development is that robots pick our entertainment.  Algorithms tell us what to read, watch, and listen to.  When you open Spotify, dozens of playlists wait for you -- none of which you or anyone you know created.  We have surrendered our taste to the machine.  And what's worse, we're starting to forget we lived a different way...What I miss --just enough to remember it, for now-- is a well-curated jukebox, the way a dollar-bill-huffing machine with a 100-compact-disc capacity could express the personality of a place...What do we lose when e stop making our own playlists?  If the algorithm decides what we like, then what are we like?  J.K. Rowling, famed for her Harry Potter series, donated her book The Ickabog to children  (she did the same for Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, donating all profits to charity).  In the book's opening she asks: What do monsters tell us about ourselves?  What must happen for evil to get a grip on a person, or even a country, and what does it take to defeat it?  Why do people choose to believe lies even on scant or nonexistent evidence?  

     Joy Harjo, the poet laureate of 2019, read a poem by her daughter, a poem titled Directions to You: Sunset brings darkness, brings black, we find solitude, time to take in breath, and pray.  Even in darkness you can be found.  Call out, even in a whisper or whimper.  You will be heard.  To find, to be found, to be understood, to be seen, heard, felt.  You are breath.  You are memory.  You are touch.  You are...right here.  Perhaps the Vegas we remembered, along with our relatives, can't return.  Perhaps certain things --other than war-- should be left to the young, to another time.  Keep moving along son.  But to have been there with them and at that time and at that place, for that I felt fortunate.  Maybe it wasn't anything to do with Vegas after all.  To think that my birth, my still being alive, my still having such memories, was for all of us equal to a one-in-four-billion chance of creation.  This is the time of year when we start to sum up things, to face the cold and the sunset, the "end" of the year.  But as with life, there will come that time when we will all complete the circle of life.  But as the poem reminds us, right now we are here...right here.