the age of paper

You think it will be here forever.  But it is almost over now.  I am getting weird plasticy stuff in the mail now all the time.  And in the grocery stores its become common.  No it is almost gone and will be before we can say good by.

I already use old stuff when I can find it like the origami paper thank god it remains and these beautiful playing cards are from the late forties when we were there in Japan and you find them at estate sales now.  If you can find them still.

Much of the energizer stuff comes from the hardware store where there are still some old fashioned companies that have not quite bothered to change.  In fact some of it comes out of my work cabinets and is already thirty years old.

All the paper I use comes from the Arches/Rives plant in France.  Thank the French for maintaining them.  And of course the natural foods for kids are usually but not always in nice cardboard.  

Well yo-yos you just never know.  Magazines yuck you've felt them.  Just be happy its thin paper.

I can't wait to see these things evolve and the reverse images to show.  On the origami it will be cool.

Though I must admit I have little hope for anything at all to last even twenty years.  It just doesn't happen.  These bicycle cards were an old deck of mine.  Fine cardboard.

Ahh Botan Rice Candy.  It must be soon saying its last prayers.  I remember it from the early seventies.  The same package.  Credit cards.  What junk.  But we make guitar picks from them now.

That's fun.  They are gleamy and shiny and have multiple images in them so when you do make picks from them they are harder to lose.

And these Chinese food containers.  They used to be white all of them then they got colored then plastic then kind of ugly and they no longer have much use to us now.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not reminiscing about the olde days but stating the fact that all ages must past.  All materials change and not always for the better.  I love paper.  And soon it too will pass.

The time of its abundance will be gone.  Sure...there will be something else.  Yep something else.  I think one of the lovely things that happened in that age of Max Ernst was the common objects then and I think part of the reason we go to art museums is to see them once more.

I can remember as a kid I could not dig in the ground without finding old arrow heads and then in Virginia I would find bullets and pieces of civil war metal and leather.  I don't yearn for them now.  I am just saying they are now gone.

Yep goodbye old paper age.