It's been a hot minute since I made an entry in this blog. Not because I don't love you, bloggy-wog, but partly because there have been a SERIES OF NATURAL DISASTERS that hit my area within a five-day span. President Obama even declared a "state of emergency" in Maryland not 2 days ago!
It all started on a perfect, sunny afternoon. I was sitting right in this very spot, reading Cracked.com and listening to reggae. (I wish I were kidding, but that happens to be what I was doing at the time.) Anyway, the whole house and all the furniture began to, well, WIGGLE. I was in a pretty good mood and not expecting a freakish nature-related incident, so my brain interpreted the motion as a passing freight train going right by the house. "Silly old freight trains!" I thought, completely forgetting that I live in the middle of nowhere and we do NOT, in fact, have freight trains running through our back yard on a daily basis. But suddenly the house wasn't just wiggling, it was starting to shake ::violently::. The deck looked like it was trying to wrench itself off the side of the house, and the table in front of me was doing a sort of hula at the joints. Then my cat came skittering into the room, claws trying desperately to gain purchase on the hardwood, but the floor was rolling and pitching like the deck of a ship in a stormy sea, so he kept getting knocked off course and wound up running into a few things before making it under the futon behind me. As the shaking reached its zenith and the floors, ceiling, and walls all tried to run in different directions, it dawned on me that this was a fucking EARTHQUAKE.
The weird thing they never stress to you about earthquakes is that absolutely NOTHING holds still. There's nothing to grab on to that isn't flailing around wildly, and that's a very disconcerting feeling. It never actually occurred to me that i was hallucinating, but the sight was very psychedelic. Over the last few years, there have been a couple of tremors so tiny that I didn't feel them at all, but they were reported in the news, and friends said they noticed them, but THIS was like... A REAL, ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-GOD- EARTHQUAKE. The quake here lasted about 45 LONG-ASS seconds, and then it was over. It so wasn't like on TV when they shake the camera to simulate an earthquake. Everything seemed to be... rolling, not shaking.
I think the scariest part was not knowing what it meant. Did it mean DC had been ripped into a new Grand Canyon like I'd been told it would by a once-in-700-years megaquake? Or was it bombed right off the map by a nuke? Did it mean the rapture was upon us? Or was the quake confined just to my town/locale? In my area, one does not expect an earthquake. Floods? Yes. Big old mean storms? Sure. But to be caught in an earthquake in this little waterside village shook more than just the dishes in the sink.
Within seconds I was finding out about it, because I happened to be at the computer when the darn thing hit. I was shocked to find out that everybody and their momma had felt it, from South Carolina to Toronto. (WTF did THAT mean?) Then I found out that the epicenter of this 5.8 quake was in Virginia, which, in case you did not know, is Maryland's next door neighbor. The epicenter itself was about 150 driving miles from my house, but because I'm on the water, the condition of the soil really made the movement dramatic to say the least. S was about an hour away, inland, and he barely felt it at all, but hoo boy, out here it shook my socks off! My poor cat was still cowering under the futon 45 minutes later and when I retrieved him I discovered he had wet himself, and I couldn't blame him.
But damned if it wasn't 5 minutes before the West-coasters among us were making fun of our shock and hysteria. "5.8? HA HA HA HA HA! You call that an earthquake? I eat 5.8 earthquakes for breakfast, you pansies!" It didn't seem like a very sporting thing to do, and it made me want to punch those suckers in the no-no zone. For one thing, the quake originated very close to the surface, only 3 miles down, and that causes a lot of movement. Besides, what if there was a quake in so-cal that could be felt from there to bloody Vancouver? Wouldn't that be something?! Not to mention, we folks out here don't have buildings that are made to withstand earthquakes! It seemed rather insensitive to poop on our fear parade so quickly, especially when *someone* was still mopping up fear pee. I know it's no Haiti or Japan, but it still was scary and certainly unexpected.
Then, almost immediately, we had another natural disaster to prepare for. A gigantic category 3 Hurricane named "Irene" looked set to rip its way up the East Coast in a few days, and not just land down in Florida the way hurricanes are supposed to. Sure, Maryland has had a few very destructive encounters with hurricanes in the past, but this was supposedly going to be one of the worst ones to hit us in a good 40-50 years. EVERYBODY PANIC!!!! QUICK!!! And we did. Fueled by hysterical news anchors and governmental agencies, who were declaring a state of emergency left and right, and calling for mandatory evacuations (like of my area). S and I spent 3 days scrambling to get the entire property and my grandparents' house ready for the mother of all fucking hurricanes, set to hit on Saturday. We had 9 flashlights, 3 gallon buckets of water, enough food to see us through a decade in a nuclear bunker, 6 radios (crank, battery, solar, etc) Kerosene lamps, toilet paper, and we had crammed everything from the crawl space under the house and anything outside into our living room. All the gas stations ran out of gas, walmart and target and all the grocery stores were cleaned OUT. We, as I said, are on the water, not 20 feet from the shore, and so there was potential for some bad things to happen. We're also in the woods, and in 75-100mph winds it didn't seem unlikely that a tree could uproot and smash our house/cars.
The storm was eventually downgraded to a level 1, but they said it was still gonna mess our shit UP! They said there were signs that tornadoes would develop here, too! "GREAT! Earthquake, Hurricane, Tornadoes, all in one week!" I thought. We waited all day for the fury of Irene to unleash itself upon us. I eventually went to bed exhausted from 3 days of battening down the hatches, and woke up 5am on SUNDAY only to find that absolutely nothing had happened during Irene. It just rained a lot and there were some leaves on the ground. I was pretty pissed. Not that I longed for destruction, but the authorities and media blew this thing WAAAAY out of proportion, and scared a lot of folks. Next time they say there's a deadly storm headed our way, literally no one is going to take it seriously. Irene was a joke. We regularly get much more terrifying and destructive T-storms around here. Again, total fucking joke. We didn't even lose power (though I heard a lot of others on the shore did) and we normally lose power when it drizzles. BUT STILL - I didn't get any obnoxious emails or tweets from gulf-coast states saying "Category 1? HA HA HA HA HA I eat category 1 hurricanes for breakfast, you pansies!" Nor did I get any emails from the Midwestern states saying "You call that a twister? I use tornadoes like that to stir my coffee in the morning, you pansies!" WHY? Because THEY AREN'T IMMATURE FUCKING ASSHOLES like people on the West Coast!! Yeah that's right, I said it. You got a problem with that? I don't give a toss. I have no plans to run for president, unite this great nation and celebrate our commonality as Americans! Hell no. Y'all can suck it. And you do, you narcissistic bastards! (East Coasters hold a grudge, bitches!)
So that's why I've been too busy to write, dear bloggy-wog. I hope you'll forgive me.
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