No - this is not the "new normal"

Image courtesy of Seattle KOMO News

Today in Seattle, the air quality is so bad from the smoke that my husband was told to leave work early. Air quality today: unhealthy, at 162 US AQI.

Not that we're safe from the stench and the particulate matter in our apartment. He’s been coughing like crazy over night, and running the air conditioner constantly in hopes of clearing the air enough to sleep a little better.

Walking to work this morning, it smelled like a campfire. If you didn’t know better, you might expect to hear the cheerful clink of beer bottles, and have someone offer you a piping hot s'more.

All over Cascadia we are smelling (and seeing) the smoke from out-of-control blazes in Western Washington, Oregon, and California. That is — those of us who are not actively BURNING are seeing and smelling the smoke.

Martian-tinged skies in the Bay Area have my amateur photographer friend sending me pic after pic of the hellish views from her house in the Berkeley Hills. She — like our friends in Oregon — are packed and ready to bolt when the sirens go off, gas tanks filled, “go bags” at the ready.

I won’t touch here on the cognitive dissonance of seeing citizens fleeing in gas-guzzling SUVs from climate change-boosted wildfires. There’s only so much twisted ironic crap I can think about this year.

This isn't the "new normal" folks. The new normal will be MUCH — and progressively — WORSE. This is the "new normal's" foyer, and we're being welcomed into a hellish future.

For those of you who Wonk, you will want to read Our Dok Zoom’s Wonkette.com digest of what is going on with the wildfires out west.

Read it and weep. We are almost out of time.

#HairOnFirePeople

The sun rises over a smokey Seattle on Friday @KUOW pic.twitter.com/4WsCmWDSNU

— Megan Farmer (@_megan_farmer) September 11, 2020

_{Post written by Kira Thomsen-Cheek, aka “SninkyPoo”}