Telling stories about what's right before your eyes
Published on 2025-03-23
Last week when I got home there was a strong smell in the air. It immediately took me back to when I was a kid, living with my mother who worked with oil paints. The air smelled a lot like turpentine, which is a natural paint thinner. Ostensibly, inhaling turpentine fumes can cause a whole host of nasty problems for your body, but at the time I didn't think too much of it. An hour later the smell started to get worse. I left my room and found my roommates walking around in circles panicked about what could be wrong. Not too long after, it got unbearable, and so we all filed out to stand on the front lawn.
Our first hypothesis was that we could have a gas leak, and so we called the fire department. Fire fighters came in to test for methane and found that while the fumes were pretty bad, they definitely weren't methane.
We called the property manager next to say the air in the apartment was unbreathable. By this point it was getting late into the night and only their emergency line was available. They connected us with the regional energy company who came in armed to the teeth with the equipment to test for methane leaks, and came out declaring that while the fumes were pretty bad, they were not, in fact, methane. Not surprisingly, because methane is an odourless gas they mix with sulphur, which smells nothing like a solvent.
Of course, the fact that the fumes weren't methane didn't change the fact that it was hard to sit inside for more than a few minutes. Some of us left town to spend the night with friends. Those of us who had to stay in town kept to their rooms, with exterior doors and windows open to keep the fumes from getting unbearable.
When we got back in town the following day we found that the problem was just as bad as it was before. So, we reached out to the property manager again who sent someone in to check the furnace. In they came, noting that it smelled a lot like paint thinner before checking their methane monitor to learn conclusively that the problem is most certainly not a gas leak. They left, and the problem persisted.
Another day passed. We're all starting to doubt our own sanity. Three groups of professionals had come through the house to ascertain that while the house does have this overwhelming smell of turpentine, the problem is beyond a reasonable doubt not methane gas. While everyone seemed to agree there was a problem, nobody had a clue or the desire to figure out what the problem actually is.
So, we the tenants took up the only weapon we had at our disposal: sending another text to the property manager.
The property manager said that they'd send in someone tomorrow afternoon to do a "sniff test."
So, that morning, we closed the windows. A few hours later, a contractor came by to smell the air, noting that it smelled a lot like turpentine. They rooted around in the crawlspace looking for a dead animal or something, finding no such thing and leaving us with about as many questions as we had when they first arrived.
The property manager got back to us that evening to say that the problem was indeed quite strange and that we should send them an email if it doesn't go away in a few days.
It doesn't go away in a few days.
A few days pass and we send another email to the property manager. Somebody swings by, digs around for a bit, checks for methane for good measure, hops in their van and drives away. The property manager says they couldn't find the source of the issue and that we should look for it and get back to them.
That brings us to today.
We're mostly fine, for the record. We discovered a few days ago that the fumes are a lot more bearable when we disable the heating system. Of course that gives us the unrelated problem of the house being cold as hell all the time, but it is a step in the right direction.
For a lot of reasons, I think it took me growing up to properly understand what it meant to be poor. I, like most people in my country, grew up inundated with propaganda that'll tell you that poor people are lazy. Hard work pays good money. No work gives you no money, and therefore poor people must not be working hard enough.
I think this narrative necessitates at least a little projection. When you have a comfortable amount of money, you can buy your problems off. You can buy things to make sure you don't have problems in the first place. That's not to say people with money are necessarily happy—I imagine most of them are actually quite miserable for unrelated reasons. But it is true that money gives you this super power you probably don't even realize you have, where quite a few of your problems disappear before you even notice.
If you don't have that steady flow of money keeping your problems at bay, entropy catches up to you, and a lot of people stand to gain from keeping you down.
Dotted around my neighbourhood are these downtrodden and boarded-up single-family detached homes. They might look abandoned if they weren't overflowing with vehicles. Usually a few of them are pickup trucks. It's hard to say for sure what's going on in them. There isn't much of a culture of talking to your neighbours in this place.
Every weekend, I take the bus to the grocery store to pick up food for the week. Timing the bus on the weekends is extra hard because they come much less often. One wrong step could mean standing next to an arterial road for 35 minutes in the freezing cold or the scalding heat, where the only thing to do is stare at the cars driving by. I swear to God this city has at least 0.5 pickup trucks per capita with the way they dominate our roads. Although, I could just think that for the way they draw your attention—they're easily the loudest vehicles you'll regularly see.
I remember a few months back I attended a counter-protest to this local far-right rally against… something? Something to do with transgender people, though the specifics seem vary from week to week. For all the zingers they had about Justin Trudeau plastered on wooden signs, the thing that stood out to me the most was this one guy who installed a train horn on his pickup truck, and was blasting it the whole way down the road.
I heard it again and again in the weeks that followed. You could hear it from anywhere in town. The last time I'd heard the cry of a train horn was when I was a kid, and it stood out quite a bit in the otherwise silent soundscape of the night.
Many of these people were likely coming down from their nice properties up in the mountains. Many others were coming back to slums a lot like the one I've found myself living in.
This isn't to make an economic argument for bigotry. I mean, fuck everyone who ever hurt someone to satisfy their own lust for cruelty. But I do often think about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and others, and the way those stories impact our understanding of the world. I have to wonder, in what ways is the story of my life similar to the life of the man with the train horn? In what ways is it different? If they are similar, what other stories was he being told that lead him to bully pedestrians and transgender children?
Recently I've gotten really into editing Wikipedia. The bureaucracy satisfies the policy research nerd in me. One of Wikipedia's policies is that all articles need to be written from a neutral point of view. Of course, the significant challenge of writing an encyclopedia in a neutral point of view is the fact that reality isn't neutral, and sometimes trying to play both sides of an issue is worse than saying nothing at all.
These days I'm finding I'm a lot more interested in subjective experience than "truth," for any way you might define it. All experiences tell us something, even the ones we don't like or maybe don't want to hear.
Empirically measurable problems
Not to mention, the way I tell it says a lot about me, and the way you understand it says a lot about you.
Or maybe it doesn't say anything at all. I guess it's all a matter of interpretation.
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