Ok, so my dumb little entries yesterday turned prophetic; at around six there was a tornado warning until nine. I guess to the south and the west there was some serious damage done. Keep in mind since the demented wooly head took over my La-Z-Boy I haven’t watched a newscast and the internet weather channels are about as reliable as sticking your head out the window, though they do have an ongoing Doppler and you can figure out what’s going to happen even without the professional affirmation. I mean seriously, has anyone in America made it to high school without doing that tornado in a beaker experiment?
I was watching back episodes of Justified on my computer, in between I read my email, my mom, from two flights down said I was right about tornados, so I went down to see if they were alright and they were both asleep in front of the TV. Some pro game was on; I didn’t recognize the colors, maybe two expansion teams.
You know that counting thing, one one thousand and so on, between the lightening and the thunder to judge how far away is? Something like a mile for every second (though that seems awfully convenient, you think if nature conformed to our system of measurements it’d be more likely to be a kilometer. Heh. Hollywood has us believing that aliens, acts of god, end of times --- they will all be aimed at America. If Jesus were to come back sporting OG and riding in a space ship with an oversized brewski in a brown paper bag, I’m pretty sure it’d be a liter or two liter and not a forty)? Well several full sky flashes weren’t letting g me get past the first one thousand (and/or Mississippi if you are so inclined) before the thunder rolled over. Pretty exciting shit.
I turn off all the electric things in the attic to crash anyhow, except the kindle which is on battery and the smartphone, same thing, and the cable modem. I had to sit up every so often to make sure the cable modem was still on as this area’s power grid is like a third world country, you got great big transponders on the telephone poles. Notice how most of y’all haven’t seen one of the commercials with a kid on a bike coming across a downed powerline and a voice over about safety? It’s because in the 21st century power runs underground. I realize before I moved back here I made it sound like this was mostly a rural town, even the university is a land grant college with thousands of acres of farmland. Bucolic, three directions are bucolic gently fading into rural. You expect that thirty miles into farmland that the phone and power lines might still be overhead as it would cost millions of dollars to high bandwidth to like eight people. Even so you know they have generators of their own as you can’t have all your winter stores of meat, for instance, defrosting, or the live livestock going hypothermic.
But this is a suburb of the seat of government for the state of motherfucking Michigan. You’d think the power grid would have been upgraded since the bald guy who was a general and invented the family sit com was in office (clue; his last name starts with Eisenhower. Ok, the second clue; first name was Dwight. No, I don’t mean Gerald Dwight Eisenhower Ford, who was almost as bald, but was an astronaut or some such shit, maybe he played football, and, by the time he took office {sans election I might add} some places in this country had power lines underground). But, no.
So among the few conversations I had in my sleep last night (the conversations were real, I just wasn’t all that awake for them) power was a concern and cell phones were used. In 21st century places a cell tower is more likely to be hit by lightning than an underground cable. In my beloved Clackamas where my beloved shack was and the best dogs in the world lived out most of their lives, when the power went down it meant the power station had been hit. Clackamas county is mostly rural, though where I lived was definitely urban even though it was a wetlands and blue herons would howl year round and geese would winter there compelled to act like roosters and herald the dawn, which wouldn’t be so bad if dawn didn’t come first thing in the morning. Just saying, even in Estacada, a town but the kind where coyotes might get your pet or hungry bears might paw at your trash, had fiber optics underground.
Thing is Oregon has had a lot more practice at being impoverished, and still has modern water, sewage and power. It used to be a popular storyline in science fiction that we become so used to modern technology we are lost without it; commies, aliens, whoever takes out our power grid and we live like dog packs. I think the transition here will be pretty smooth. Maybe rough on the undergrads, but hell, everything is rough on the undergrads. I mean, of course, the traditional undergrad; eighteen and out from under parental supervision for the first time ever. A thirty year old with a couple of kids returning for a degree is a different beast. You may not want to copy his or her homework, but they are likely as not to be better equipped for a harsh world. That and they’ve been laid a few times and don’t drink until they puke, well, not every time. You will notice that at bars for grown-ups there is a conspicuous lack of Beer Bongs.
I suppose I have real things to say about specific events in my own life, I just seem to be refusing to write about them for reasons known only to myself. Perhaps I’ll leak them to me and then I will totally nark myself off, I’ll be all like “Dude, I can keep a secret for realz, double pinky swear and shit” and me will be all like “Ok man, double pinky swear it is then, you know I can seize your property if you go back on a double pinky swear?” and I’ll be all like “Seize this” and me will be all like “Dude, spit those out, they aren’t yours” and I’ll will be all “That doesn’t even make sense.” And me will go “Neither does your mom.” Yeah, I’m prepared for Gotterdammerung.
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