On the Philly Water Panic and Reality Distortion Fields

Sup y’all,

I haven’t posted on here in a minute for various personal reasons, which, uhhhh, my bad. I’m trying to make it up by posting a relatively long piece that includes relatively normal capitalization practices. Here’s a blog.

On Sunday, everyone in Philadelphia got a push notification sent to their phone at like 1:15 that said, “hey everybody it’s the city of philadelphia, just a heads up there was a chemical spill and it got into the water supply so everybody might wanna start drinking bottled water starting in 45 minutes hahahaha your so cute pls don’t be mad at us.” 

It turned out that the chemical spill had happened on Friday night, but that nobody had really noticed when the news broke because (A), a factory in West Reading that made chocolate Easter Bunnies had exploded that same evening, killing seven, the tragedy of which sort of crowded the non-fatal chemical spill out of the news cycle, and (B), we did not know that the chemicals, reportedly a “latex finishing solution,” would end up in our drinking water, OR that one of the ones that got spilled was also present in East Palestine. This is, sadly, how people operate — it’s a lot easier to care when the details are lurid or it’s actively your problem. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. The main issue at the moment was that it seemed like everyone was about to need a shitload of bottled water, and this was a thing that we did not have, which is how I found myself leaving the table halfway through lunch to buy as much water as I could at a Fresh Market across the street. The part of the city we were in wasn’t actually affected by the spill (a friend was in town so we took him to the fancy part of the city), but by no means did that stop the neighborhood’s residents from flooding the Fresh Market for some damn-ass VOSS. (The cut-off for stuff that the fancy people viewed as worth buying seemed to have been Mango Chainsaw-flavored Liquid Death, only a single case of which was on the shelves; there was plenty of store-brand seltzer and Smart Water to be had.) 

Down where we live, which was decidedly in the splash zone of the chemical water, things had gotten pretty wild. Basically all the stores were sold out of