One Week Later . . . No Change

I'm still too stressed to blog, but here are some interesting observations anyway. What the hell. I'm sitting here in The Dustiest House in the World, in which every single thing I pick up to pack has to be washed first, since it's all covered with a quarter inch of thick brown. . . something and I can't stand it any longer. It's horrible. No wonder we were all sick all last year. Everything is grotty and there is dog hair everywhere and piles of cardboard and oh god, oh god. My car broke down again on Thursday night, by the way. Just, you know, to add to the chaos (also, young M has a sinus infection) and in case that wasn't enough, there is, of course, no gas in WNC. Particularly no high octane gas, which is all my mother's finicky, ancient car takes. Yeah. Things are just fucking nifty. My friend J called me last night and was all, I thought things might be easing up and you might want to go get a beer. HA HA! YES! LIKE I COULD EVER GO OUT AGAIN OR DO ANYTHING BUT PACK AND CRY! NOT LIKELY! Can't figure out why she hung up so quickly.

If that isn't enough to make you sick, try some organic bananas. My brother, all unsuspecting, got a bunch of organic banana boxes to pack things in. Now, experienced packers know that banana boxes totally suck, because they're open on the bottom and also they always have all this weird plastic & paper banana wrapping stuff in them. Well. I have a new reason why they suck and also why there's no fucking point to buying organic fruit and vegetables, ever.

That would be because the boxes and everything in them were liberally doused with seriously toxic pesticide. They might have been grown organic but that doesn't mean they stayed that way, oh conscientious Earth Fare shoppers.

I discovered this as I was pulling the banana packing stuff out of the boxes and stuffing it into large trash bags. I had just finished tossing 9 years accumulation of weird garden chemicals into large trash bags (yeah, I know, they should have gone off to the special hazardous waste dump in proper containers as a good upstanding citizen would not doubt have done but jesus christ, I'm clearing out TWO HOUSES HERE with a deadline of EIGHT DAYS LEFT and HOLY FUCK WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS SHIT and, thus, such niceties have long since fallen by the wayside) so when I started smelling what I assumed was wasp and hornet killer, I figured a can of it had landed upside down in the trash bag. Wrong. The pesticide smell, thick enough to hurt the back of my throat and make me dizzy, was coming from the banana boxes. All of them. The organic banana boxes. Suddenly, it was all clear: they spray them on the docks before they put them into boats. Of course they do, because otherwise they'd be full of tarantulas and banana rats. And flying squid.

Okay, I'm making up the squid and possibly the rats but the tarantulas are real, I swear. When you think about it, it makes terrible sense and you wonder why you ever thought that organic food was actually organic. It's not, people. Organic only means it wasn't sprayed while it was actually growing. Once it's been picked, all bets are off and if it's coming from far away, it's been sprayed to within an inch of your life. Yeah. Great news, isn't it? A & I, who cleaned out my mother's entire garage today, which took six hours and possibly years off our life, are just going to drag the boxes to the curb. We're not going to tear them down for recycling or anything. They need to just go away and we want our innocence back.