Particulate Matter

I left the office at 2:30 this afternoon, at the behest of my manager, because both New Jersey and New York had declared states of emergency due to incoming violent storms that would drop seven inches of rain in just a few hours on the New York/New Jersey corridor.

It wasn’t soon enough. What is normally (at least, in summer) a 45-minute commute took over two hours. I was waiting/inching/waiting at the I-78/I-95 interchange for well over an hour – no idea if there’d been an accident or if every person in the tri-state area simultaneously decided to leave their offices at the same exact time, and the interchange was just a chokepoint.

I favor the latter notion.

When I arrived home, my street was flooded – fortunately only on the passenger side of the car, and I obviously had no passengers. The entrance to my building was also flooded – two inches of water – which has never happened in all the 10 years I’ve lived here. It was shocking.

Still, I was fortunate. I could have arrived home to something like this:

Courtesy of the Staten Island Advance.

At my new job, we are supposed to be in the office 3 days a week as of May 2025. I have found this challenging! Not because I don’t feel like commuting – I like driving, generally speaking, and I’ve found ways of making the trip to Newark from Staten Island enjoyable. Classical music. Coffee – take a swig at every stoplight! Cursing cybertrucks. Thinking, as I traverse Raymond Boulevard, about the history of Newark, and the history of my dad in it.

I also like being in a different place than my home – for the sake of my mental health, getting out is a very good thing.

But in the summer, there are air quality alerts. We’ve been getting the residue of increased wildfires in Canada – this just became A Thing a few years ago, and it’s continued. Increased ozone in the atmosphere. I’m asthmatic – this shit hurts my lungs. And with increased temperatures and heat domes, air quality alerts are more frequent than ever.

I’ve noticed that weather-related events have shot up dramatically in the last six or seven years. Every storm is a freak storm. Every heat wave is a catastrophe. I’m not being sarcastic – the hot and humid days of my childhood did not in any way compare to the conditions we’re experiencing now. Shit is measurably worse.

Summer is the apex of unpredictability, weather-wise, and I’ve found that I need to apply for, essentially, a papal dispensation to work fewer than three days a week in the office when there’s an air quality alert. It was never something I had to think about before – I was working from home for the last five years, and the commute never came up. I never had to think about the weather – I just had to stay inside when it was bad.

As we’re re-emerging from COVID and expecting life to go on as “normal,” the climate has moved on. It’s outpaced us. There’s particulate matter to contend with, where there never was before – and this is a result not just of increased detection, but increased stuff to be detected. There are ever-more-vicious storms that drop flash floods with little to no warning. These are unprecedented weather events, and each year is more unprecedented than the next.

When I was a kid, every morning my dad would get up, shower, get dressed, and go through the garage, raising the door to get outside. He’d stand there in the driveway – whatever the weather, winter or summer – and get a whiff of what the day would be like before grabbing the newspaper and coming back inside.

In a lot of ways, I’m glad he doesn’t have to live through this. It’s anxiety-inducing. It makes me fear for the future – and not the near to semi-distant future! It makes me fear for next year.

I realize I’m not helping when I say stuff like that. I know I’m not the only one with these fears. The oppression of the weather – just like the oppression of COVID – curtails our movements. It means that fewer things are possible. I was joking to a couple of friends about moving to Maine – years ago, that would have been a fleeting thought, a far-off maybe. But if it becomes impossible for me to breathe in the New York-New Jersey area, where does that leave me?

The map in the header image is from four hours ago. It depicts Canadian wildfire smoke over the Great Lakes region. The smoke that contains particulate matter that triggers asthma in approximately 28 million people in the US alone. This does not include people with emphysema, COPD, and other respiratory illnesses.

And, increasingly, the idea that we can commute to work at all – that we can leave our houses for even short periods of time – will be unworkable for many people. (And yes, I’m aware that the information at this particular URL will probably change as fascism works to deny any reality that doesn’t conform to its fantastical vision – it is a government website, after all.)

I don’t know what the answer is, except more humane understanding from corporations who rely on a human workforce. (Don’t get me started on the environmental costs of a non-human workforce.) Quite probably, the answer is regulation. Imposing restraints on the unfettered capitalism that’s rampaging through people’s lives.

I worry we’re beyond that now, just as we are beyond a wholesale remediation of planetary distress. I hope for better! We deserve better! But these so-called long-term guys are actually short-term guys – Musk and Bezos and their cohort have literally given up on this world. They are willing to burn it to the core, and us within it.

Meanwhile, some of us are just trying to fucking get to work in the morning.