Unexercising, second coming & zuke til you puke

Dear Rachel,
Do you have any smoke health advice? I mean besides the usual “stay inside, close the windows, don’t exercise” stuff. Obviously I already have masks. This is Durango, though. We’ve got to have some creative solutions that let us still live life to its fullest without scratching our lungs out with dead tree particles. I wondered, what does Rachel do? So I’m asking you.
– Smokey the Bored Bear
Dear On Fiyah,
Exercise already went virtual with the pandemic. People don’t actually run marathons. They just get the T-shirt that came with their registration fee. I don’t see why you shouldn’t take that a step further during fire season: say you WOULD have run a marathon, but DIDN’T for your health. Post murky pictures of the haze with captions like, “View from the run I didn’t take. 26.2, here I don’t come!” You can go to bed feeling good about your health and being obnoxiously public about it.
– Don’t run, Forrest, Rachel

Dear Rachel,
I am the first to acknowledge that I form my own bubble. I’ve pretty much cut out people who believe that bigotry, racism and incivility are acceptable. But I can’t root out the friends of my friends. So, I put on one of those old-time scuba suits and took a deep dive into Facebook comments from Trump supporters. They really, truly believe he is Christ’s candidate. How the actual eff has satire become so real?
– Donald Stumped
Dear Oxygen Deprivation,
He’s as much Christ’s candidate as Ben Affleck is the real Batman. But get this: I wanted to use the name of those old-time scuba suits in my reply. Turns out they’re just called diving suits. What really got me, though, is that the first ones (from the 1710s) were literally a long barrel with two arms sticking out. Which means, among many things, that they would make fine presidential candidates that do not crack under pressure.
– Going down, Rachel


Dear Rachel,
Too. Much. Zucchini. Enough already. Every amateur gardener in my hood and in my family planted zucchini again, and they’re leaving bags full of obscenely monstrous produce on my porch. I can’t eat all this. Even if I could, why would I want to? God made so many delicious foods, but my cupboards are full of the most boring squash on the planet. What’s my safe way to enjoy disposing of the excess zuke without hurting any gardener’s tender little feelings?
– Zucchinonono
Dear Delicate Squash Blossom,
You take one picture of you eating zucchini. Make sure it’s cut up and all its identifying features (skin tone, scars, tattoos, etc.) are cooked beyond recognition. You send that picture to each household that gifted you its bounty. You thank them profusely, and stress that you’ll be eating on their gift into next December. Then you donate the rest to Manna. What, you expected something snarky? It’s food, dude(tte). Don’t waste it.
– Children in China, etc., etc., Rachel