The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Vinny was a small man. Just about five feet tall but whatever he didn't have in height he made up in manliness. In fact, Vinny was so masculine you didn't really notice his height once you got to know him. He always wore a white v-neck t-shirt, a tuft of black chest hair visible through the top, blue jeans and black work boots. He was stocky too. Built like a little truck. Only smoked cowboy cigarettes. Face like Brando. Freely expressing his love for large breasts. He was like a small dose of 50's lawlessness incarnate. We would sit in his room listening to old records (Eric Burdon's The Twain Shall Meet and Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan were favorites) doing line after line on his drafting table while he simultaneously cut out tiny images of ships from old history books with his x-acto knife. He would dissect them further, turning them into shipwrecks and then glue them to expansive pieces if off-white Cotton paper. I would start going on and on about the island made of plastic bottles in the Pacific and what it would look like with the passage of geological time... Imagining the kinds of creatures that would evolve there, the plant life that would evolve to need the compounds in plastic to survive. He would make some heady Deleuzian reference to try and upstage me... The night went on like this until we couldn't see. Seems so innocent in retrospect, never considered how those moments would evolve into something desperate and broken.