The yellow vulcanized rubber of my sleeve is catching on the edge of a jagged 26-gauge steel flange, and all I can think about is the way the priest’s voice cracked when he said the word ‘eternity.’ It wasn’t the word that got me. It was the squeak of his cheap synthetic shoes on the marble floor. It sounded exactly like a failing gasket on a high-pressure pneumatic pump. I laughed. It wasn’t a small puff of air; it was a genuine, chest-heaving bark of a laugh that echoed off the mahogany casket and made 56 people look at me like I was the spill they hadn’t figured out how to neutralize yet. But that is the thing about being a hazmat disposal coordinator like me, Olaf V.; you realize that death, much like a chemical leak, is just a logistics problem that most people are too polite to solve correctly.

We are obsessed with the idea of total eradication. We want the world to be a hospital hallway, scrubbed of its history and its odors, but the frustration of this modern life-what I’ve been calling Idea 21 in my late-night logs-is that we’ve sanitized the soul out of the machinery. We think that by removing the mess, we remove the risk. We spend 116 hours a month staring at screens that have no texture, no grit, and no smell, wondering why we feel like ghosts in our own skin. The contrarian truth that no one wants to hear while I’m vacuuming up $456 worth of spilled mercury is that the mess is the only part of us that is actually real. Everything else is just a temporary state of order that we’re paying guys like me far too much money to maintain.

My visor is fogging up. It’s been 46 minutes since I entered the containment zone, and the internal temperature of this Level A suit is hovering somewhere around 96 degrees. You start to see things differently when you’re breathing recycled air through 16 layers of specialized filtration. You realize that the ‘clean’ world is an elaborate performance. We use 236 different types of industrial solvents just to make sure we don’t have to look at the byproduct of our own existence. I remember a job back in 1996, a simple warehouse leak involving a proprietary foaming agent. The owner kept apologizing for the ‘ugliness’ of the site. He didn’t care that the fumes were melting the structural integrity of his shelving; he cared that it looked unprofessional. He wanted the after-image, the pristine catalog version of his life, even while the literal floor was dissolving under his feet.

That is the core frustration. We are so busy managing the perception of safety that we’ve lost the ability to handle the raw. We’ve become a species that prefers a digital representation of a fire to the actual heat, because the heat might singe the curtains. I see it in the way people treat their environments and even their animals. We want nature, but we want it filtered through a lens and a plastic bag. We want the wildness of a wolf, but we feed it processed brown pebbles because the reality of blood and bone is too ‘messy’ for our suburban sensibilities. If you want to see what happens when you actually embrace the biological necessity of a creature, you have to look past the marketing. You have to look at Meat For Dogs and realize that the health of the animal isn’t found in a sterile laboratory, but in the actual, visceral matter of life. We try to sanitize the dog out of the dog, just like we try to sanitize the human out of the human.

I’ve spent 26 years of my life cleaning up after people who are terrified of their own fingerprints. I once had a client who insisted I decontaminate his entire basement because a single 6-ounce bottle of old pesticide had leaked on a concrete floor. The concrete was fine. The air was fine. But he couldn’t sleep knowing there was a ‘toxin’ in his house. Meanwhile, he was drinking 16 cups of artificial sweetener a day and living in a house held together by formaldehyde-laced particle board. We choose our poisons based on how they are labeled, not on what they actually do to us. We fear the visible spill but embrace the invisible rot. It’s a cognitive dissonance that costs us roughly 4566 dollars a year in ‘wellness’ products that are just more chemicals used to mask the smell of the first set of chemicals.

There is a specific kind of silence that happens when a spill is finally neutralized. It’s a dead silence. It’s the silence of a room that has no biology left in it. I hate that silence. It’s the same silence that followed my laugh at the funeral. Everyone there was trying to pretend that the man in the box hadn’t spent 76 years being a loud, sweating, breathing, leaking, wonderful disaster of a human being. They wanted him to be a memory in a gold frame, not a body that was currently undergoing a very natural, very messy chemical transition. By laughing, I broke the seal on their sterile grief. I reminded them that even in the middle of a $6676 funeral service, the plumbing of the universe still squeaks.

I made a mistake once, early in my career, during a routine disposal of 36 barrels of unidentified industrial sludge. I thought I knew the pH balance. I didn’t. I mixed the wrong neutralizing agent, and for about 6 seconds, I created a cloud of purple vapor that smelled like burnt almonds and old childhood memories. It wasn’t toxic, as it turned out, but it was vibrant. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in a containment zone. My supervisor gave me a written warning and a $156 deduction from my pay, but I didn’t care. For those 6 seconds, the warehouse wasn’t a ‘site’ and I wasn’t a ‘coordinator.’ We were just part of a reaction. We were participating in the chaos instead of trying to trap it in a drum.

We are currently living in a 56-year-long experiment to see how much of the ‘mess’ we can remove before we lose our minds. We automate our conversations so we don’t have to deal with the awkwardness of a human pause. We use GPS so we never have to experience the ‘risk’ of being lost. We buy furniture that looks like it was grown in a computer because natural wood has knots and ‘imperfections.’ But those knots are the story of the tree. The imperfections are where the life happened. When I look at a 46-year-old man who has never had a scar or a stain on his reputation, I don’t see a successful person. I see a high-density polyethylene container: durable, sterile, and completely hollow.

My oxygen alarm just chirped. It’s a soft, polite sound that reminds me I have 6 minutes to exit the zone before I start breathing my own carbon dioxide. I start the decontamination shower process-166 seconds of high-pressure chemical wash followed by a 26-second rinse. As the water hits my suit, I think about the fact that I’ll go home tonight to a house that I’ve scrubbed so hard it feels like a museum. I’ll sit on my couch, which is covered in a protective spray that repels liquids, and I’ll eat a meal that comes in a vacuum-sealed bag. And I’ll feel that familiar, nagging Idea 21 frustration crawling up my spine.

We think we are winning because we have lower bacteria counts on our countertops. We think we are winning because we can delete a mistake with a keystroke. But the reality is that we are just creating a larger, more volatile spill in our collective psyche. We are denying the very thing that makes us part of the world. A dog knows this instinctively. They don’t want the sanitized version of the world; they want to roll in the grass and eat the raw meat and be 1006% present in their own bodies. They aren’t afraid of the squeaky shoe or the purple vapor. They are the only ones left who aren’t trying to live their lives inside a hazmat suit.

I step out of the suit and feel the cool, ‘unfiltered’ air of the warehouse. It smells like dust, diesel, and a hint of ozone. It’s objectively ‘dirty’ compared to the air inside my mask. It’s full of particulates and potential allergens and 26 different kinds of microscopic debris. I take a deep breath, and for the first time since that funeral, I stop feeling like a gasket. I feel the grit in the back of my throat, the weight of the 66-pound gear bag in my hand, and the stinging reality of a world that refuses to stay clean. It’s a disaster, really. It’s a beautiful, leaking, un-neutralizable disaster. And I think I’m okay with that.