Plastic bags.

New York wants to do away with plastic shopping bags, as California has.

They can take my plastic bags when they pry them -- well, actually, they won't have to, because like California, New York is shedding citizens quickly. The last person left will be in a plastic-bag-free zone, I guess.

But that's not the issue I was addressing today. It's the plastic bags that dry cleaners use. My question for you is, do you leave your clothes in the bags when you bring them home from the cleaner, or do you take them out of the bags?

NO! DON'T DO WHATEVER YOU DO! DO THE OTHER THING! YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

Sorry. It's just one of those stupid issues where people will tell you something with absolute assurance and be contradicted by a similar person a moment later. The Internet seems to be falling out of love with the YOU'RE DOING _____ WRONG storyline, but it loves to make the same scold in different ways.

I usually leave my dry cleaning in the plastic when I bring it home, to keep the nice clothes safe and free of odors (i.e., bacon) until the next time I wear them (e.g., someone dies and I need the black suit again).

Well, how dumb am I? The environmental loons at EWG tell us that dry cleaning chemicals are so toxic that you have to air dry your clothes outside after you get them dry cleaned. So the birds can put back what you just had the cleaner take out, perhaps.

Others, perhaps less frantic, say you need to take the clothes out of the plastic to get the chemicals off-gassed before they can discolor your clothes, and also that dampness from the cleaning process may cause mildew. And everyone hates plastic anyway because it's garbage that lasts forever.

But wait! My dry cleaner has this poster up:

"Protects clothes in your closet! Breaks down in the landfill!"

Okay! So maybe it's all right to leave biodegradable plastic on my clothes? No, that can't be right.

This particular cleaner with the sun-bleached poster is proud to avoid using the popular dry cleaning chemical PERC, a.k.a. perchloroethylene, which is probably healthier for the workers (per OSHA) but will have no effect on anyone else.  But WAIT! EWG would want to know, does he use Siloxane D5? Hydrocarbon cleaning fluid? "There are very few truly 'green' dry cleaning technologies," they say, and go on to list no actual processes one might consider "dry cleaning."

So many perils! So many wrong choices to make! What do we do?

You probably know what my advice is in these circumstances: Do whatever the hell you want. Seriously. You're going to be wrong anyway, according to all the right people, so do what you want. Leave the bags on? Groovy. Take 'em off? Fine. Inhale chemicals? It's your trip. Smell like bacon on your job interview? Go for it. When we're always wrong, we might as well be wrong in the way we like best.

Personally, I will continue to leave the bags on in the closet. That way, when I have to wear the black suit to my own funeral, you won't smell the bacon. I mean, I know the formaldehyde with which they shall fill me will likely drown it out anyway, but you don't want to give people the wrong idea. "I thought I knew what Fred was made of... turns out it was bacon."