Wildfire season is back once again and my days of enjoying the fresh spring air are over. As are, thankfully, my days of sweating at night because it’s too warm for me to sleep comfortably on my memory foam mattress but not warm enough to turn on the AC. I mean, hell, with the arrival of the warmer days, the winds have shifted and sometimes even a massive cold front that brings the outside temperature down into the 40s doesn’t have enough wind blowing in the right ways to cool my apartent down (my bedroom was in the low seventies, nearly thirty degrees above the outside ambient temperature, and it was miserable). But those days are over now because it’s finally warm enough to turn the AC on and the sudden arrival of wildfire smoke means I peobably shouldn’t be sleeping with my windows open anyway. Gotta let the air filter through my AC unit first, to clean up some of the smoke. Or so I’d say if my AC unit actually had a proper filter and not a tightly-woven wire-mesh “filter” that clogs instantly and yet never actually cleans the air of anything but the largest particles (of which there is an endless supply thanks to my neighborhood trees and my pet bird). Instead of relying on that for another smokey summer, I’ve bought myself four hundred dollars of air purifiers (they were MASSIVELY on sale, so this would have easily been 600-700 bucks worth of air purifiers any other time) and spread them around my apartment.
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Fighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone
Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.
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