Pip: If you’ve ever wondered who’s out there, the week before an election, posting their nearly three-thousandth video about wood smoke particulates — RAWSEP Residents Against Wood Smoke Emission Particulates has your answer.
Mara: lindakarr904744833 has a post up that weaves together indoor air quality advocacy, PM2.5 documentation, and the particular emotional weight of doing that work right before votes are counted. Let’s start with what that post is actually doing.
Webisode 57: Posting Through the Wait
Pip: The premise here is deceptively simple — someone has been posting videos about indoor residential wood burning for long enough that the archive is nearly three thousand entries deep, and they’re adding another one anyway. The question the post sits with is what it means to keep going when the count hasn’t happened yet.
Mara: The post sets up that tension directly. The lines read: “Until tabulation next Tuesday I feel so all alone / Until the count next Tuesday I feel so all alone / I make plans for afterward but I feel so all alone.”
Pip: That’s not self-pity — that’s the specific loneliness of advocacy work in the window between doing everything you can and finding out if it mattered.
Mara: And the post is clear about what the work actually is. The ask is concrete: make your own video, document the PM2.5 pollution level, and submit it. The archive grows because individuals contribute to it. The post even carves out legitimate reasons to be elsewhere — knocking doors, voting — and names everything else showboating.
Pip: Which is a fairly efficient way to tell your audience you know exactly where their attention should be the week of an election.
Mara: The post also reaches for historical scale. It invokes Obama’s 2008 win three times — “Like Obama in Two Thousand Eight, We will win again” — and references pollsters, prognosticators, and international prediction models from Brazil and Serbia. The wood smoke issue is being placed inside a much larger civic moment.
Mara: Voting hours being prolonged gets repeated as well, framed as genuinely good news worth saying three times over.
Pip: Nearly three thousand videos, one more posted anyway, and an explicit invitation for anyone watching to add their own documentation of PM2.5 levels. The archive is the argument.
Mara: The post ends where it began — keep posting, make the pollution level clear — which is less a conclusion than a standing instruction.
Pip: Wood smoke, PM2.5, and an election on the horizon — the air quality case doesn’t pause for the calendar.
Mara: Next time, we’ll see what comes after the count.