Grey tan orange

The smog, the smog, it's driving me mad
I need it to rain, I want the rain bad.
Horizons should be so much farther away
Than this one, approaching, so blurry and grey.

Outside I breathe in and instantly feel dirty. I want to put just the filter part of a cigarette in my mouth and breathe through it. The city smells like distant burning garbage, like rags discovered in an abandoned garage. Forest fires. Smog. Forest fires.

It's like waking up the next day and smelling the smoke in your hair from last night's pub crawl, smoke you didn't even notice at the time but now seems disgusting. And it reminds you of things you may have said, which seemed clever at the time, but now seem disgusting. I wake up just like that and realize -- I stayed in last night! But I still feel coated in invisible essence of disappointment.

Do something. I don't know, put up big fans on the hilltops to blow it away, and on ordinary days turn them into windmills, generate some electricity. We keep flashlights for blackouts, water for earthquakes. What do we hoard for this, air? A garage full of air tanks? "What are all those?" "Oh, nothing, I was just thinking of maybe someday, you know, opening a scuba supply shop or something."

It's still everywhere. Rain for me.