Greenwashing is the despicable practice of spending a bunch of ad money to make it look like you did something to reduce your corporation’s environmental impact without actually doing anything to reduce your corporation’s environmental impact.

This is Apple’s new ad for the MacBook Pro.

Claims it makes:

• Made with recyclable aluminum.
• Uses a quarter of the power of an incandescent lightbulb.
• No mercury or arsenic used in display manufacturing (LED instead of CCFL).

How we are being bullshitted into feeling better about buying their expensive, beautiful, elegantly designed, decadent, capitalist luxury fetish objects:

• Yes, aluminum is recyclable. So what? Why aren’t they using recycled aluminum? Because it costs more? What the hell am I paying my $2000 dollars for?
• This guy ran a bunch of tests to determine the power draw of several different Mac laptops from back in the G3 and G4 processors. Guess what? They too can be said to use only a quarter of the power of a 60 watt incandescent bulb. And that was back in 2002.
• Ok—I can’t really argue with this third claim except to point out that Apple isn’t the only one doing this by any stretch of the imagination, and if they want to be seen as any kind of a leader, they’re going to have to do a lot more. Read this article about the benefits of LED-backlit displays over CCFL displays.

So what exactly is this ad telling us? That Apple knows damn well it has us hooked already and doesn’t need to do a damn thing to keep our loyalty, even in these troubled times, beyond throwing us a bone to ease our troubled conscience. That Apple is taking pretty much the same stance on global warming as the Bush administration: sidestep the issue until somebody forces them to act.

What else could they be doing with all the bank they’re making as the tech industry once again proves itself recession-proof? How about a sponsored computer recycling program? How about spending some of their %@#! ad budget on some research and development? How about voluntarily making their whole operation carbon-positive?

If it wasn’t Apple and I didn’t already love them and what they do, I wouldn’t be so pissed off about this.

I know this is kind of an odd digression from my usual pagan insanity. But something about this really gets me. The themes are all there. And the expressions on these ladies’ faces… damn.

John Everett Millais, The Vale of Rest, 1858

Millais was an English Pre-Raphaelite. You may be more familiar with his Ophelia or The Princes in the Tower.

Once, when I was eleven, I was attempting to get air off a graded curb at the bottom of a steep hill on my wee department store BMX bike when I lost control and took a header into a fire hydrant. At least, that’s the event I’ve reconstructed from the fragments I actually remember from that afternoon, which include sitting covered in blood on the side of the road wondering what the hell I was doing there, getting asked a barrage of worried questions by my father, sitting in the backseat of his car wondering how I had got there, then the same barrage of questions from a doctor.

The whole experience was dreamlike and actually kind of wonderful. I was pretty damn frightened of death when I was eleven—I had a cousin who died in a motorcycle accident around then—and was generally a scrawny wuss terrified of pain. But neither pain nor fear comes into the memory at all. I was just sort of awed, wondering where my mind had been, where I had been, in those black spaces I couldn’t remember. It was like I had traveled through time.

I was probably reading Madeline L’Engle and CS Lewis and Jules Verne in those days, watching Back to the Future over and over on VHS like it was my job.

The other night, under dubious circumstances which shall not be discussed, I slammed my head quite forcefully against against a telephone pole and collapsed in the street. Or at least so I have been told, by bystanders who actually witnessed the event. All I remember is sitting up from the street mumbling, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Didn’t go to the doctor this time. Should have, maybe. Stubborn.

It’s a fascinating thing, though, the fragility of consciousness. Being a sheltered, coddled, writerly recluse like I am, I probably don’t get enough reminders of it. I’ve been reading up on shamanism lately—on the magical origins of culture. Back then, it was exactly this sort of experience that might have been interpreted as a call to the shamanic vocation: a death or seeming death, followed by a return to life.

Not that I experienced any spirit visions while I was under. At least, not that I can remember. But that’s the point: I don’t know what happened during those blank spaces. Maybe I dreamed. Maybe I saw god. Apparently, during some of the time following my encounter with the fire hydrant, I actually appeared awake and alert, answering questions, moving under my own power. Was that really me? Or was it just my body, walking and talking without me in it?

Fun to think about.

Jay Ridler’s story “Blue Harvest” is up in the November 2008 issue of the online horror zine Nossa Morte. And it is awesome. Prose honed to a point you could play records off of. A story worth learning from.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the new online magazine of literary adventure fantasy, has started doing podcasts. The first one is Yoon Ha Lee’s rich and decadent “Architectural Constants”.

Benjamin Parzybok, whose debut novel Couch I got to read while it was still in production at Small Beer Press (and which is so mindblowingly cool I wish I had written it), is doing a New England reading tour. I get to go see him November 20th at Amherst Books.

I suppose I could crow about Obama, too… but I won’t. Not that I’m not overjoyed he got in, and that he’s getting a cute little mongrel shelter puppy for the white house… but I see the results of the ballot in California, the smarmy self-congratulatory smiles of pundits, and I just can’t believe everything’s suddenly going to be all right. 15 billion a year for energy research? How much are we spending per day in Iraq? Has anybody ever bothered to calculate the carbon emissions of a bunker-buster? Feh.

Hem. Sorry. Not trying to ruin it for anybody. It’s a good thing I have fiction, or I’d be a hard person to live with.

Tzompantli is the nahuatl word for a wooden rack used by the Zapotecs and Toltecs for the decorative architectural display of sacrificed human heads—images of which appear all over Central America in pre-Colombian stone carvings, murals, and scrolls, and no doubt have had at least some small influence on the modern celebration of the day of the dead.