Journey of the Mind: a Waking Night-mare

While trying to learn how to sell on the web in a class in BOCES, I had a sudden awful vision.
We were trying to learn how to sell some of our possessions we no longer prized, but which might be of interest to others at the right price, for them and for us. The one other class participant was seeking to sell some holiday drinking glasses. Our instructor connected to the internet, projected on the classroom large screen, and I began to understand for the first time just how much merchandise there is available. It amounts to millions, maybe, billions of items for sale by individuals.
The following image filled/flashed completely formed into my thinking, my brain.
It was landfills full of debris, trash, throw-away junk that people no longer wanted to possess. All the landfills were full. Every municipality, cities, small villages, had all exhausted their ability to dump unwanted debris, garbage, trash, curb pickup treasures. Suddenly our communities were fighting for empty spaces to fill. The Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Yankee Stadium, the deep sea trenches of the western Pacific, all of the self-storage units, garages, spare rooms, attics, basements and abandoned tenements, factories, decommissioned ships, coal mines, copper mines, and other extractive cavities - were suddenly filled to capacity with unwanted toys, trinkets, treasurers, hobbies, “the latest fads,” imported treasures and the “must have” fashions.
Our worlds, personal, community, global, became an endless flotilla, convoy, “Berlin Airlift” of containerized “latest” needs. The accumulated, collected and uncollected trash begins to take over the median strips between our highways, the millions of square miles of parking lots, and all national parks..
There is no land to grow food and no space for dance!
Suddenly all production ceases all over the world because everyone has everything and no place to hang a hat and no yearning for more items, no longing, no curiosity, no interest. Meanwhile; CO2 builds, and there is no clean water, no fish, no ice. Wall Mall charges fees for shopping carts. All roads, highways, bridges charge expensive tolls as high speed conveyer belts fill spaces between interstate lanes. All passenger vehicles become two seat-er shopping carts. And drivers are fined for driving without merchandise in the baskets. Presidential Medals of Honor, made of pressed, shredded sales slips are awarded to the most spendthrift citizen with the most trinkets in storage.
The human race will bury itself in the debris of unsatisfying, and unsatisfiable, greed while all the cacophonous bands play, “Nearer our gods to thee.”
All of the above projected itself rather quickly as I failed to learn how to buy and sell on the internet.

Richard E. Lake