If---when

“It should not have been there. Nobody did a damn thing. And now the damage is done.”
–quote from BBC News article, Toronto Recovering From Fireball

So. Asbestos I can tell, the air quality following Toronto’s propane explosion is a-okay. This proclamation by no means exonerates any actual threat. Indeed, I’m renowned in certain circles for flubbing air-quality predictions. Who knows what the inevitable if—when cycle will bring. Maybe five years’ hindsight will bring a tear to the eye. Or maybe glaucoma. In the meantime, I’m stayin. I’m finishin my coffee. All right, one more cigarette, said the asbestotic caretaker, wheezing his way up the stairs.

Among the wreckage, a relative absence of bodies. A godsend, if you’re so inclined. Take what you can get, I say.

I need your strength, she said, not your weakness. He wasn’t listening. Instead he was drifting from thought to thought, and most of them weren’t good. Horrorshows and worst-case scenarios.

“It’s been about forty-five and a half hours since the Sunrise Propane Industrial Gases propane repository blew skyhigh in the YouTube event of the year, Melvlem, and most of the evacuees have been allowed back to their homes. And boy I bet I can guess the first thought on their minds as they walked up their driveways: I hope we weren’t looted. Now I’m about five kilometres from Ground Zero, Melvlem, and whether or not there’s really asbestos in the air, lead and silica dust, as many people are speculating, well I really have no idea. But I can tell you this: I’m sneezing, my nose is running, my tummy hurts, I’m having chest pain, not to mention a splitting headache and a fever of a hundred and one and a ruthless case of the chills, I’m coughing up blood and pulmonary fibroids and black cancerdots, a psychopath with a machete is hunting me down, a classified spy plane is shooting at me, a lion is nipping at one heel, a grizzly bear at the other, an alien is trying to get out of my stomach, there's a poison dart sticking out of my neck, a knife in my gut, a spear through my side, a thorny crown on my head, my hands are tied behind my back, my bursitis is giving me fits, my gout acting up, my knees are killing me, and if I don’t run any faster this bullet behind me is going to slam into my thigh any second. Frankly at the moment I could care less about asbestos.”

We interrupt this bulletin to bring you a silly little poem:

Scissors are fun
With them you run
You used to have two eyes
Now you have one.



For Bob Leek and The Other One RIP