My neighbor Swamp Rabbit dropped by on Sunday to wish me a happy Father’s Day, but we ended up talking about that strange day earlier this month when the air smelled like burnt toast and the skyline looked like a blurry photo viewed through a sepia filter.
“I woke up with a hangover and smelled the smoke and figured the swamp was on fire, ” he said. “It wasn’t, so I went back to bed.”
I got up that day and investigated. A talking head on the Channel 6 news alerted me to the source of the smoke — wildfires in Canada — while I was ordering a slice of Sicilian at Vincenzo’s, near the swamp. A code red air quality alert has been issued for Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The pizza man sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” but he stopped joking when the talking head said there would be no Phillies game that night because of poor air quality.
The pall lifted a few days later but not before the news media made clear that the air will only get worse as climate change caused by fossil fuel burning makes wildfires “more frequent and intense.” A Philadelphia Inquirer article offered suggestions on how to cope: Avoid driving. Stay indoors when you can. Close windows. Wear a high-quality mask.
“I’m surprised they didn’t just tell us to stop breathing,” Swamp Rabbit said.
Wildfires are only part of the pollution problem, I reminded him. In February, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and local residents flipped out after receiving conflicting “expert” opinions on how dangerous the leaked chemicals were. This real-life incident and its aftermath were strikingly similar to the “airborne toxic event” in Don DeLillo’s bleakly funny novel White Noise (1985), which touches on our refusal to directly connect such toxic events to our ongoing assault on nature.
“Bleakly funny?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What you mean by that?”
“We fret about pollution all the time,” I replied. “The more we fret, the more we pollute. You don’t think that’s funny?”
Footnote: White Noise, like many great novels, is prophetic. One of its main characters says, “It’s no wonder they call this thing the airborne toxic event. It’s an event all right. It marks the end of uneventful things. This is just the beginning. Wait and see.”
The novel was made into a Netflix movie last year.
Odd Man Out 
Yes, the answer is to stop breathing. I stopped a month ago and it made all the difference. I also stopped eating, drinking and watching cable TV. Now all I do is read Odd Man Out and study neurosurgery on Youtube. I say to deniers and pussy-footers everywhere, the time has arrived to awaken and smell the burnt toast, it being a tonic, whole grain. There is no cause for concern. There are no concerns. Stop thinking. Only one man can solve this.
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I’ve stopped eating except for an occasional slice, and I only drink French colonial water since the tap water panic in March. Breathing is a hard habit to break, especially for runners like me, but I’m trying to cut down. As for Odd Man Out – I write it but I don’t read it, it’s too depressing.
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