Rant #3,147: When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

What do you make of all of this smoke that is in the air?

We have been told that it is the result of the residue of the Canadian wildfires that has somehow blown several hundred miles south of that country into ours, and a wide swath of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. is getting this haze.

We are certainly getting it here on Long Island.

I saw a report yesterday that our air situation is far worse than that of India, which normally has the poorest air po9lution in the world—

Not just worse, but about three times worse.

This makes it completely unhealthy for anyone to be outside, because whatever we are breathing in is not good for us.

Heck, we are being told to wear masks outside right now!

It really is very bad, especially for someone like me, a highly allergic person whose allergies are bad enough this time of year without the stink of this residue adding insult to injury.

Throw into what is in the air to my usual wheezing and coughing and blowing my nose, and what you have really is a mess.

That rancid burning smell is in my nose and my throat, and my eyes are being affected by it.

It takes me a while each day to see clearly, and my eyes are itching up a storm each and every day.

Some people think that this is more than just wildfires blowing their ashes over here, that this is some evil plot to see how much we can stand of it.

I won’t go that far, but I never remember such a thing happening in all of my 66 years, so I understand where these people are coming from.

On Tuesday night, I was watching the Yankees-White Sox game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and there was a brown haze over the Stadium that was so bad that I said to my wife, “How are they even playing this game under these conditions?”

The next day, the game was postponed, and will played today as part of a doubleheader … that’s if this haze isn’t as bad, but from what I have heard, the haze isn’t going to leave us until at least Saturday at the earliest.

Nobody talks about this, but will there be any lingering effects of this pall on our health?

I don’t know, but when I feel like I have just smoked a pack of cigarettes each day of this pall, I really have to wonder about that.

I mean, I have no idea whet it feels like to have smoked a pack of cigarettes, since I never smoked, but if this is how it feels, thank goodness I never got into that habit.

My maternal grandfather smoked heavily during his lifetime, and my father smoked up until my mother was pregnant with me, but I never was enticed to try tobacco, and based on what we are going through right now, I made the right choice in my life.

I see people smoking today, on top of this haze that we are experiencing, and I think that even they should cool it while this thing hangs around.

As for me, I am even tasting it in my throat today, constantly clearing my throat.

As for my family, we have all the windows shut, even though it is kind of warm in the house, and in the evening, we use the air conditioners to try to circulate the air in the house while we are asleep.

I don’t really know what can work against this brown pall, which makes the setting sun look like a sort of burnt orange disk in the sky—but we are doing our best to get through it.

You know that old song, “When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes?”

Well, I now have smoke in not just my eyes, but in my nose, my throat, and probably every other opening in my body, and I can rightfully say that it makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t like it …

I am counting the moments until this thing goes away permanently, and never comes our way again.

And that plea is not just blowing smoke!