Hard-hitting, clear-headed reviews of cats. Also, cat-related news.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Tim(othy) Dicks's Review of Hurricanes

OH MAN it's starting to look like Disaster Christmas here. Sarah rolled in today as I sat stewing and choking down an energy drink and told me to prepare to be rocked by a hurricane. I imagined the balcony windows breaking out, breaking in, glass everywhere. Us untouched, hiding in the hallway, drinking fine Mexican beers from cans. Outside, palm trees crushing my junky car. The dick neighbor's house with an SUV stuck out of its side like a boil.

Smash!

But it looks like things might not get so wild here. The governor has declared a state of emergency but it sounds more routine than desperate. The normalcy of the situation is almost a little disappointing, which I write knowing that it makes me one of those naive assholes who waits for something interesting and dangerous to happen without considering that it might tear his head off or blow his entire apartment into the uncovered pool in the neighbor's back yard. I still find myself hoping to see trees all over the road, the only path out of this neighborhood blocked. I still imagine the call to my job, the morning spent drinking bottled water, watching cats fly by outside the bedroom windows.

This probably has something to do with growing up in the Midwest, where the worst disasters came in the forms of monster snow storms that did nothing (in my perception) other than get me out of school for days on end. Here of course there would be property damage and injuries and death but I'm having trouble imagining those things as genuine consequences. The most valuable object I own fits in a laptop bag and my girlfriend and I are so far lucky in disaster situations. In the event of a flood or a tree through the wall, my first reaction would probably be to check on the landlord's dogs in the house at the bottom of the stairs. Let's go, dogs, I'd say. They'd rub their filthy noses all over my pants and tear ass up the stairs. They wouldn't know anything was really wrong either.