Bad Air
“How’s your dystopian Tuesday going?” my friend asked, stepping into my car with a mask on.
This was a month after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared “over,” well after people in the United States stopped wearing masks on the regular. It may never be over.
“What a stupid time period we live in,” I scoffed, looking at the hazy sky.
His mask protection wasn’t for COVID. It was for the outdoors.
“I mean, I can’t believe it. First, we’re wearing masks inside, now we’re wearing masks to protect ourselves from the outside. It’s all backwards.”
“I guess it’s good that people have supplies this time,” I commented, referring to the fact that the masses now had masks at their disposal. Four years ago, this would have seemed rather odd to anyone in the US outside of the healthcare profession to keep masks at home.
It’s a weird time in Chicago. The air is bad and this weekend we’re supposed to host a NASCAR race; streets are closed for these car races, too. I’m fearful for many reasons. Not only do I think it’s unsafe (will a car hit the Art Institute, for example?) and that the city wasn’t built for NASCAR and that most people in this city aren’t “NASCAR people” and most NASCAR people probably aren’t fans of cities, but I’m also fearful because the air is bad. The city is excited for this opportunity economically, but will it fail due to this current pollution? Will people come? Will the cars worsen the pollution even more?
On this day, my friend and I were both sad. It was simple as that. We were sad that we lived in a time period when we had to deal with a global pandemic and a heating up world. Maybe this wasn’t unique. Certainly, someone my age in the 1970s was sad about the Vietnam War. Someone my age in the Middle Ages was also dealing with a pandemic, and perhaps they weren’t even as lucky as me to live to the age I am now. Someone who was 31 during the Industrial Revolution could have been against the energies being put towards steel and train travel, even though we praise train travel now as an environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Maybe a person during that time was sad that life was less simple. I’m terrified of the things swarming around us, like how more people are more concerned about the economy rather than the levels of plastic in the ocean, how ChatGPT is giving high school students a reason to not learn how to write papers, how political rights are getting striped away by the Supreme Court. Are we all bound to become more and more inhumane in the wake of technological advances and dangerous weather?
Today, I was sad about the air quality in Chicago. A few weeks prior, New York City had the worst air quality in the world and my city was dealing with the same issue from Canadian wildfires brushing bad air everywhere. It seemed like no one really cared because everyone went about their day as if things were normal. We all cared because it was inescapable news and the air felt stuffy and smelled like a bonfire. I guess “cared” is the wrong word here, but I think of what someone I know posted on social media: “Climate change can’t be this mundane.”
We were sad because the media likes to make us sad. Or not sad per say, but they like to keep us watching and usually fear is a reason to keep us watching. I can’t tell you how many times I read, “Chicago has the worst air quality in the world.” I hate hyperbole, especially when it’s accurate. I hate reading this even more.
My friend and I met up with a third friend and we all got tipsy at a happy hour in Lakeview. We got distracted from the outside talking about our past weekends: a wedding with a guest who went awry, a block party that involved riding a mechanical bull, a recent friend’s bachelorette party. How could we so easily not be thinking about the air quality?
I’ll tell you why: humans are cursed with knowing they’re going to die, knowing that their parents will die, knowing that the planet is heating up, and yet we’re adept at ignoring things.
I mean, we kind of have to ignore these things, right? We can’t be depressed all the time. The people in our lives don’t like that because they want us to be happy. But it’s easy for me to think of these things constantly. It’s also so easy for me to not think about them if I’m engaged in some other way, be that drinking, or a trivia night, or a movie.
I don’t really understand why the air inside isn’t as bad as the air outside when air is air but it makes me think of the dark days of the pandemic: we are stuck inside and we don’t know when the air will improve. I realize COVID is something we’ve loosely gotten past, even if people are still getting sick, but it feels like we are now in an era of staying indoors.
Chicagoans don’t like to stay indoors during the summer. Our warm seasons are so short and precious that we have to take advantage of being outside. But how can we do so when faced with bad air?
I compost and recycle religiously because it’s this thing that maybe marketing has made me believe in. If I do these things, I feel like I’m helping even though it creates such little impact. If I throw away a water bottle in the trash, sometimes I think, “What if that’s the thing that ends us all?” which is way too much pressure for one person and one water bottle, but it seems to be all I can do amongst climate change’s chaos.
When I told my mom I was sad about the bad air, she said, “Anything that threatens being alive is depressing.” Surely. So, it’s okay that my friend and I are sad about the air. Maybe that’s normal.
What I will say is that I think if the human race knew it was going to end, I’d want to go out with a big party. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in my room being sad, the way I can be sad now with time left. We’d go out like those people who danced themselves to death in the Middle Ages, the one with dance fever, something I’ve been thinking a lot about ever since Florence and the Machine put out their album with the same title. They were sick, but I like to think they went out having a good time. I’d have hope that humans would host an end of world kegger where bros would stand on their hands and chug and laugh and dance to EDM music. I’d hope that we’d have a theme party about it and dress as our favorite natural disasters.
I guess if the world were to end, I wouldn’t really know about it. It would just happen, kind of like that submarine implosion that enraptured the media because it was also a very startling, sad event. And I guess it’s okay if we keep doing our happy hours and trivia nights and watching movies because this is how we live the fullest and heal in uncertain times; it’s how we find a calmness amongst the storm, find shelter from the bad air, get in touch with our humanity, and take some time to breathe.
Sophie Amado graduated with her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago, where she taught undergraduate writing and rhetoric, and her BA in English and Spanish from the University of Iowa. In 2014, she received a Fulbright grant to teach in Madrid, Spain. Sophie is the Creative Nonfiction Director for Arcturus, a magazine of new perspectives. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Sheepshead Review, Blood Tree Literature, and more.