An old pine tree which recently met its demise in front of our house. It had been shedding heavily in the years prior. The others? Also struggling. Neighbors blame a pine needle blight, but I know. Pine needle beetles are opportunists, are they not? Any case, I didn’t see any sign of pine beetle boring. My dad used to pay me to pluck those suckers from the spruce trees and spray the tips of all the pine trees annually, the latter being under protest, the former was kind of fun. I always hated that smell, the smell which meant exposure. There’s different means of boring into the needles and the bark, but the various signs are hallmark.
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I had a customer when I lived in Seattle. We can call him Ed. He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He was my best customer. He used to buy computers from me all the time. Lavish, expensive computers that he could use to play Eve Online. He owned the most powerful mothership in the game. His war stories are interesting, engaging, and some of them too ghastly to be told. He used to call me up randomly, talk for only a couple of minutes, then politely but hurriedly inform me that he needed to hang up the phone so he could go be sick. I never understood before I met him why he would rush off, or why this man shrouded himself in the escape of his computer games. It was only after I met him in person that I began to understand, while I could never fully comprehend, the full picture.
For the longest time I faced a moral dilemma in owning a gaming computer company. Who was I helping? It was only after meeting this man that I knew there were some people I was in fact helping, if only in this limited scope. But enough about me and the pathetic rationalizations for my own limitations of helping others. This story is about Ed.
Ed had or has a real nice house in the suburbs of the Seattle area. A beautiful house. I know from experience in my most recent house, you can live in a gorgeous house but it can feel like the Taj Majal. That was Ed’s house.
Ed got some money in a settlement, I presume. A settlement for his damages from Agent Oranges. His body is his own worst enemy. That’s because Agent Orange is a forever chemical. There will be no relief in this lifetime for Ed. Ed will always get sick from this God foresaken substance.
There was mold growing on the walls when I first moved in to our current home. We used that nasty stuff, well I think it’s pretty nasty, called Kill (Z). A paint which makes the headaches strong. Any case, when we first moved in there was mold underneath all the pretty wallpaper and embedded in the caulk of each windowsill of all the bedrooms. Gave us nasty headaches, made us a little sick.
In my research, I think this is no ordinary mold. I think it’s a super mold. I think its like antibiotics. I think it’s like antibiotics in that you kill most of it with the fungicide, pesticide, fertilizer they must spray on the corn field nearby. But the mold that survives, that is one tough fungus. Superfungi.
Here in Scottsbuff, I’m told, the fungus is quite common. There’s a concept in agriculture that I didn’t know about before I moved here called corn sweat. It’s a thing. A thing I didn’t know about before we moved to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. An otherwise relatively dry climate nearby my native Colorado becomes sort of swampy feeling certain times of year. You have to utilize a dehumidifier just to break even, but as the locals know it’s a losing battle. Sort of like my friend Ed’s losing battle with Agent Orange.
Ed is the type of man who would literally give you the shirt off his back. When he found out I was into scuba diving at the time, he didn’t hesitate to give me all his old scuba gear. He couldn’t use it anymore. It didn’t fit me, so I passed it on to a friend or acquaintance we can call Jeff.
I mentioned that Ed owned or owns literally the biggest mothership in the game of Eve Online. That’s no small feat. There’s not many of those flying around the cosmos. Ed offered to give it to me for free. I couldn’t possibly. But he did offer it! That’s the truth. Just the truth. The whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I don’t think Ed would hesitate to trade it all for his health. Your health is your wealth, as they say. I share this sentiment. The health of myself, and my family, is like a precious jewel. I don’t care what anyone thinks about our shared sentiment. Anyone who would trade this precious jewel for a little temporal satisfaction of any amount is a fool. Take that to the bank and smoke it.
They say the lung’s soft tissue is not unlike wet tissue paper. So delicate, and so complicated, and yet so capable of supporting life in a healthy environment. How many thousands of times per day do we breathe? How many millions of times in our lifetime do we breath?
When that superfungi gets in your lungs. When those pesticides and herbicides and yes even fertilizers get in your lungs. When somebody, somewhere, allows your body which is your temple to be violated in this and these ways, there is no other way to describe it. It is a violation of God’s intended purpose for the magnificent, miraculous, human body. The end.
What do I want? I want a 100 yard buffer for all spraying of all kinds. And I’m pretty sure history will show that we had no business spraying in the first place. But for this exact time… what do I want? I don’t want to smell it this year. I know that if I smell it again, I was exposed again. And that means my family was exposed again. And that means my children were exposed again.
What do I want right now? I want the spraying to stop. We can talk about the rest later on.
