Have you ever sat peacefully beside a window in the early evening hours and watched as little bunnies hop through your yard and the neighbor children blow bubbles and sing songs and mow your lawn and then a rainbow explodes in the sky overhead and you know that all is right with the world and all you need is love and give peace a chance?
And as the sun sinks lower in the sky, the fading light falls through the glass of your window in such a way that you can see thousands of spinning dust particles dancing on the air?
And then you think to yourself, "What the fuck?"
Because those spinning dust particles GO IN OUR LUNGS, people. We suck them in like we're living vacuum cleaners, and I feel that this is unacceptable. Not at all acceptable. Not even the tiniest bit.
As a kid, when I happened to catch a glimpse of the dust particles I would suddenly feel like I was suffocating because I figured that though they looked like they were suspended in air, they weren't actually suspended in air, they were slowly being sucked nearer and nearer to my face and then they were being inhaled into my lungs where they were beginning the slow and deadly process of congealing into a lung-putty made up of ashes and crumbled moth wings and cat dander which would mix with my lung...oozings, and that combination of liquid and solid would become a giant mud pie and which would eventually squeeze all the air from my lungs and then the death certificate would read: Dust Motes.
As I've grown older, I've come to terms with the fact that I breathe in microscopic particles into myself 24 hours a day. I've come to terms with that fact despite those commercials where the giant pile of flea dung gets smeared all over an innocent baby because those terrible commercial parents didn't use a specific type of allergen-reducing air filter (AHEM, 3M, I'm looking at you) to keep the innocent baby safe from lung mud pies.
Because apparently just because something is called a "filter" does not mean that it will actually FILT anything. The cheap ones are just paper towels stapled to the cardboard out of some dude's microwave box. I'm pretty sure that the fancy ones use two sheets of paper towels and a beer carton.
All of this is to say that I think you should go check out The Women's Colony and read my piece about frog murder, which is relevant to this post because both dust motes and frog murder tend to put a damper on your day.
You crack me up... WHAT THE FUCK does this post have to do with your title? Love it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was really little I told my mom that floating dust particles you see in the light coming through the window were souls of dead people.
ReplyDeleteNow I feel bad for breathing in all those souls.
It's funny, while you spent your childhood obsessing over suffocating on filth, I spent MY childhood thinking I was magical because I could see mostly-invisible fairies and spirits from the "other side." Hmmmm...
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, somehow I still turned out to be "that girl" who washes her hands 14,000,000 times a day and worries CONSTANTLY about the germs on shopping carts. (Seriously, I don't know what random diseases the last person who used that cart had, but they shopped at Wal-Mart, which means I don't want it.)
Bleach please?
Not only are you breathing those microscopic particles into you everyday, the bulk of them ARE YOU! You know how you shed a layer of skin every three days or so? We're all cannibals.
ReplyDeleteWhat the fuck is wrong with you? Work me all up talking about ingrown cooter hairs and let me down with this shit about lung mud pies.
ReplyDeleteDust particles are bad but poop particles are way worse. Gross.
ReplyDelete