Second-hand Mexican smoke
a SUIT column by Chris Jungle

There is something safe about living in the desert. Most of the natural disasters that take place around the glove and in overbudgeted movies always have a habit of bypassing the desert. No tornadoes or floods. Earthquakes keep to below 3 on the Richter scale. The worst ecological problem the barren wasteland has is the occasional drought, but a string of long water pipelines take care of that difficulty. This week, an unexpected group of clouds wafted over my town. They didn't carry rain, or snow, or fairy dust. It was ash. Moreover, it was Mexican ash.

The rain forest and wilderness in Mexico have been burning for a while now, and I had been ignoring the reports of how bad the problem was until it came to my town. It wasn't a big deal until it was my backyard. I had read the reports about the smoke creeping up into the gulf coast area and the lower part of Texas. That's what they get for living there, I grumbled. It wasn't my problem.

Now, the smoke has made it to the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's not up to "dangerous proportions" according to the fine men and women who give air particle updates, but I can feel the rainless clouds affecting me.

First off, I don't want to put effort into anything. What's the point of working hard if the air is full of flakes of burnt rain forest? How can anyone expect me to be a productive member of society when a walk outside has just as much detrimental effects as good ones? What good is life when the air stinks? Sure, I may be getting exercise when I run outside, but swallowing ash makes me feel flaky. The ash could be affecting my brain as well because I'm using bad puns and chuckling far too long about them.

I don't think I can deal with living around sooty skies for a long period of time. Any kind of bad air is lame. I once lived in a town where I got a whiff of the cattle stockyards for an hour or two at a time if the wind shifted the wrong way, and apocalyptic visions have haunted me ever since. I won't go into detail about them, but one involves an eight-legged sperm whale, the beast within the beast, and the burning of a Lincoln Log cabin.

Needless to say, I'm afraid of what the ash might due to my psyche. I try to ignore it like the millions of people who live in smog-filled metropolises, but dirty air leads to dirty thoughts. Even if I pretend the air is clean, the nastiness will sneak into my mind and lungs, leaving me a beaten man by merely breathing. I tried not breathing for awhile, but apparently there are some thoughts my body just won't believe are good choices.

Maybe the government can blame the tobacco companies for the rain forests going up in smoke. With them as the scapegoats, we could get some cash for our trouble. Who can we sue because the Mexican rain forests are burning? The Mexicans? Try again. The Rain forests? It would be an interesting trial, I suppose. Prometheus? He hasn't been seen much since the birds stopped eating his liver.

So there are health risks to this Mexican ash and no way to make a dime off of it. I don't see the upsides here, so why are these fires still going? Our president rushes to every tornado dropping down into a trailer park in the South, and Congress delegates millions from the disaster fund to help out the victims. Can't we send some people to put out the fires? We send doctors to help stop disease outbreaks in other countries, ambassadors to smooth over violent hot spots on the globe, and our most popular singers to countries without indigenous musical talent. Couldn't we gets some firemen to cruise down to Mexico for a while? I thought we were supposed to help more after NAFTA, or was that just about making more money?

The bad air is fading in my town, and I'm hoping for a good string of northwestern winds. But don't worry about any of this ranting I've been doing. It's just a strange situation going on in my town. It's not your problem. It's not our country's problem. It's someone else's problem--which means there must not be a serious problem at all.

Chris Jungle can now use cottonmouth as a reason to call in sick for work, and no one will suspect a thing.

return to the Shut up, I'm talking page
return to the LIES home page
return to the A&A home page