The Last Word On Nothing

If you grew up in the U.S. South or Midwest, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the “live laugh love” home decor aesthetic. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to describe, as it takes many forms, but, like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s farmhouse-chic, all reclaimed wood and burlap, with positive messages written in swirly calligraphy or what looks like someone’s down-to-earth handwriting. It’s the wall art in the type of suburban home that has no fewer than five throw pillows on the couch and monogrammed towels in the bathroom (the confusing type, where the last initial is the biggest letter in the middle, so a towel for the initials JCH would read j H c).

The words live, laugh, and love need not be present, but the essence of the aesthetic can be taken in many directions. They’re popular decor at weddings of hetero couples, or as commemoration of their love. They often display Bible verses or one’s Christian bonafides (“raised on sweet tea & Jesus“). Its “zaniest” form is the wine lady, who’s all about “wine o’clock” or, simply, just living, laughing, loving, and drinking wine. And its liberal version is the “in this house, we believe” sign, which includes phrases like “love is love,” “Black lives matter,” “feminism is for everyone,” and “kindness is everything.”

No disrespect to anyone who’s partial to that style of decor — it’s just not my cup of tea. But earlier this year, I came across a live laugh love-style sign that I’ve been obsessed with for months. It appears to have originated on Tumblr, and says:

In this house
we ♥ believe
this is not a place of honor
no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
nothing is valued here
what is here is DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE
the danger is in a particular location
the danger is still present in your time
this place is best left Shunned & Uninhabited 

Upon first glance, this resonated just as a counterpoint to the usual expectation that your home should be warm and inviting, full of “good vibes only” and positivity. I feel exceedingly lucky to have a stable place to live and I do take joy in making it a place I enjoy spending time, but I have spent so much time in here, especially over the last year. I live, laugh, and love, here but I also couch potato, cry, and get angry. I let the dirty dishes pile up, I forget to water the plants and then try to make up for it through overwatering, and now we’ve got a fungus gnat invasion. My dog puked on the carpet last week and I didn’t notice for days. Big rainstorms have flooded the basement thrice this winter. Dust bunnies roll across the plains beneath the bed like tumbleweeds. This is not a place of honor. What is here is dangerous and repulsive.

And then, upon my second read, the lines evoked a feeling of vague familiarity, the same way I feel when I recognize someone’s face but can’t remember their name. Suddenly, I remembered how I’d encountered it. My friend Heather Hansman wrote a High Country News feature about cleaning up waste at the Hanford nuclear site, and this paragraph had sent me down a rabbit hole:

What happens if people are trying to farm at Hanford in 100 years? Or 1,000 years? How do you tell people in 200 years not to disturb the soil? How can you be sure they’ll understand the same things we do — the same language, the same symbols?

Explaining the concept of nuclear energy and its dangers succinctly would be a challenge now, not to mention humans (or aliens!) in an unknown future. My Googling led me to a 1993 report from Sandia National Labs detailing some potential designs and phrases one could use to communicate that nuclear waste is stored in a location, and what the danger of disturbing it may be. The report recommended that any nuclear site be carefully designed to communicate non-linguistically that there could be horror and sickness. “Put into words,” the report says, “it would communicate something like the following:”

This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location…it increases toward a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

“We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture” gives me chills every time. I picture some future human, thousands of years from now — if humans can still exist at all — stumbling upon these words and imagining us, the ancient humans, so full of hubris.

And as much as I am tempted to make my own live laugh love nuclear sign, I wonder how much that would confuse future archaeologists. I doubt the rustic wood these signs are made on would remain preserved, but what if it did? Would the site of my home be classified alongside Hanford and Yucca Mountain as a forbidden zone, because it, too, had a placard warning of the still-present danger?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons. Description: “The new supplementary ionizing radiation warning symbol launched on 15 February 2007 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).”