no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive ‘vegan leather’ and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket’ bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate’s back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather… its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years…
also they love love LOVE to try and sell you “plant-based leather” that you then look at the details and it’s “45% cactus” or whatever and there’s no mention of what the rest of it is
it’s plastic.
it’s always plastic.
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Let me tell you a story.
50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it’s body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.
But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.
The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn’t melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.
Anyway, I pulled grandad’s jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.
The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there’s no market for leather these days. Its skin won’t be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a “vintage” cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they’ll sell another one.
the man who owns and runs the thai restaurant in my town knows me by name. he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful men i know. i started ordering from his place back in january, which was when i got my fibromyalgia diagnosis. back then i was using a walker, had limited mobility in my entire body but especially my hands, and was very visibly in pain. i always ordered the same thing: yellow curry with no meat, potatoes and carrots only (i have texture and other dietary issues). he always made it a point to make sure i could get out the door and carry the food safely. he had his workers package the food so that it was easier for me to open. as i kept coming back and i told him a little bit about my health status, he would always encourage me to keep going. he told me about how the spices he used were good for inflammation and began to edit the recipe just for me so that spices that were even better for fighting inflammation were used. he’d give me extra portions and despite the fact that i would tip every time, i realized later that he never charged my card for them. as time went on and my condition began to get better, he would make encouraging remarks and tell me how happy he was for me. the day i came in without my walker, he practically jumped for joy, and despite my insistence, he gave me my meal for free that day. i continue to make progress with my conditions and i continue to go to the thai place. this man who does not know me personally and who i hardly know anything about is one of my favorite people. it’s interactions with humans like these that make loving life easier. and his curry really does help my chronic condition. it’s comfort food taken to the next level.
one of the reasons why “what if people went on a road trip and it was weird” is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says “what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person”.
Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people
What’s that quote? There are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button
This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
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