Sunday, August 28th 2011. The day I died. I mean, I must have, right? The hurricane Irene was so very bad.
Honestly, I’m a little confused. It must have been very traumatic to die, it’s got me all mixed up. All I can recall from that day of days is some heavy rain, and moderate wind. Surely the true horror was much worse. I fear to think on how bad it must really have been. Bad enough, in fact, that my death was so violent and traumatic that my body has refused to even acknowledge it. My heart stubbornly keeps beating, my bumholio stubbornly continues producing gas, and my mind stubbornly clings to a fanciful version of events where Marissa and I drove home safely saturday night after a pleasant evening at a friend’s wedding, cuddled up in bed, and slept soundly through the worst of the weather. Pure denial. I clearly died in that storm. My poor deluded body simply has to realize that. I have a feeling it might take another seventy years, but i’m sure it’ll come around. They always do.
In all actuality, when I woke up Sunday morning, I was a little disappointed. I felt like Mother Nature phoned it in on this one, and really dropped the ball by letting us off easily, instead of bending our neighborhood infrastructure over the nearest sturdy table and doing to it what some prison inmates might call “love-making”.
Don’t get me wrong, it was wet outside, and there was an uncanny amount of confused looking pine needles scattered across our lawn, but it clearly wasn’t the armageddon guaranteed to us by local government personnel and the news media. Will the lies never cease? All I could think at the time was “Armageddon” angry that I went through the trouble of packing all our patio furniture into the garage, when I could have just been doing nothing instead.
And then we lost power. Irene, you bitch. The funny thing is, it was already eleven am on sunday so we had nowhere vital to be, the weather outside was actually pretty nice, and I had prepared for this eventuality by collecting and testing our household flashlights, gathering candles, and moving our most perishable food stuffs into the freezer. Hell, I had even set aside six gallons of clean water, ignoring the fact that we have city water, and enough pressure remained in the system to satisfy all of our aquatic needs, and then some. All this, and yet I was still anxious.
Sure, it was partially because I was in the middle of watching the movie “Hobo with a Shotgun” and I wanted to see if the good guy triumphed in the end. (Kind of, he kills the bad guys and saves the girl, but then dies in a hailstorm of police directed bullets) Mostly though, it was because of the underlying horror my roomates and I felt when we realized we had nothing to entertain ourselves, but…ourselves.
I mean, we had things to do. We’re not slugs. We worked out, we made food on the grill, we followed the cat around demanding it entertain us, we played cards, we even went for a walk. All that only left 23 more hours in the day.
You learn a lot about a person when they are faced with a stressful situation. Marissa’s coping mechanism was to sleep for the next sixteen hours. Frank just kind of wandered aimlessly around the house moaning like a newborn narwhal and chewing his fingers. I reread some of my books for the gazillionth time, and growled threateningly at anything that came near.
How long was this horror going to last? I had a movie to finish! WE WERE MISSING OUT ON VALUABLE FACEBOOKING TIME! What if it took days? What if it never came back on!? We’d lose dollars worth of food to spoilage. We’d never get to stream free porn to our laptops again! It was almost too much handle. Luckily for us, our power came back on around midnight. Lucky for our neighbors who had never lost power, too. I had already half convinced myself that our best course of action would be to invade their home, murder them all, and steal their identities, assuming they had reasonably fast internet and a decent cable or satellite contract.
There was a strange phenomenon I noticed throughout the day too. Evidently, the loss of power made it impossible for us to clean up after ourselves. Every room we spent time in became little better than a rubbish bin within the first twelve minutes of our visitation. It really made no sense, and my sister has confirmed that her house suffered from the same unfathomable activity. The last I checked you don’t need electricity to pick up your lunch debris, or put away board games, or neatly fold unused clothing, and yet we seemed incapable of stopping the madness. If only for this reason alone i’m glad we got our electricity back when we did. The house has already been set back to rights, and the healing process has begun.
For those of you out there still languishing in the storm-induced dark ages, I pity you. And for those of you out there who see my glorious porch lights shining in the darkness tonight, and decide that perhaps you should come here seeking to steal my identity and my sweet sweet technological wizardry, I must warn you I had a lot of free time yesterday to build booby-traps, and i’m fucking ready.
Max Kramer 