dust

there's a frantic fear of death in how we relate to dust. there are jokes about what we're all becoming, and then 365 day a year calendars to keep the stuff at bay. Our couches and mattresses and bodies are all dying alike, losing our hair, skin and stuffing. No one would expect a snake to linger around it's old skin, there'd be something deeply perverse and cruel about forcing them together. it slithers away, itching, as from a funeral. And yet we've constructed containers where we're drowning in our dead selves, where it can't be renewed but only shoveled out of the door. And it makes us cough. We can't breathe for the unnaturalness of these memento mori. living in closed spaces makes organic stuff toxic. it makes US toxic, it makes us, this pooping, flowering, shedding organism, into something so putrid it makes itself gag. It's amazing that we've made ourselves hostages to our excretions. we don't give shit a chance to float in the wind, to get lost. we hoard and dump our waste as if we were monkeys that guarded mountains of shit because, for ritualistic purposes, they only ever dumped it down the waterfall. this is ultimately because of the sickening density of human encampments, and how hard the ground becomes under our heavy feet. the earth loses its power to compost when humans start stomping over it, let alone cementing over it.

dealing with waste is such an elaborate ritual, it's an exorcism in the modern world. the flush of a toilet is like a whirlpool for an enemy; we beat our curtains like we throw a drunk out of a saloon.

nothing is biodegradable in a city. dust is a luxuriant phantom, something that outlives itself. by what right does this flimsy, barely there thing grow? i guess by the same rights as the stars in those galactic nurseries. cities, hard ground, contained space are unwitting sanctuaries for these half dead bits, these zombies that should die, that should pad the nests of birds and should grow the future. but instead we're sheltering them and they repay us with asthma.

nothing is biodegradable in a city! it's all so violent! isn't it extraordinary how we impact garbage, how we light the leaves on fire, how we carry it so far away? this is supposed to be the fault of our non degradable industrial stuff, that styrofoam is our problem, but the fact is that nothing is degradable without our violence. the quick work of maggots is romantic compared to the hard hands of human sanitation. and so things get dusty.

imagine collecting up all the hairs and dead skin and bits of blood and pee and everything else that living makes you leave behind and making a little you out of it. i wonder how big it would be for an entire lifetime. AH! i bet by the time you turn 100 the shedded dead bits would make a large thing, a kind of growing zombie as you age, your own monument to your death. instead of a child outgrowing you, your own dead bits would finally stand taller and that would be all. what an idea. anyway! i write this because our contained spaces, our homes are shelters for the construction of these zombie homunculi. it's the same with couches, imagine building a zombie one from the fragments, so delicate and toxic, as eery as a dead little girl. they're so fragile, so ready to dissolve at the touch of a breeze, and yet we're growing them, these wicked unnatural creatures. and trying to keep them out we're frantic with HEPA vacuums and all the energy in the world. it's a filthy memento mori, it is. keep the windows open.

this would just be whimsical and odd, these zombie bits we're ever collecting, if it weren't for how toxic they often are. computers are more insidious in breaking down, you don't get miniature macs with the apple rotting and sagging, but PBDE's that infiltrate your breast milk and retard your children. INSERT OTHER PERNICIOUS SHIT HERE. And the other problem is that all these zombies attract a lot of dust mites that poop constantly and cause asthma and ruin that beautiful, creepy idea of dust made up of you and your things, a ragged undead version of your world. the tenants of that world end up being run of the mill, eminently alive, disgusting little things.