Fear And Trembling or "Did You Feel It?"
About five minutes after I got out of bed yesterday, I was on the phone with Mrs. Pops. She goes in really early. She never calls that early, but she's helping out with a friend's bridal shower this month, so she had a list of stuff for me to do.

Just as I was about to tell her what I thought about that, just when I was about to point out that she was the one who volunteered to help and she should leave me the fuck out of it, goddamn it, because I'm a man and I don't have to do what she says because she's not the boss of me.

And then BOOM!shake-a-shake-a-shake...

Earthquake! Aaaaaagh! Earthquake earthquake! Doomed! Dooooomed! DOOOOOOMED!

Then it stopped. I have no idea how my wife knew what I was thinking and even less how she managed to rattle the very earth in order to pre-emptively punish me for it, but I apologized immediately anyway.

The quake measured 4.4 on the Narcis... er Richter scale and was centered in Fontana, roughly 25 miles north of me (as the MapQuest flies). When I learned that, the first thing I thought was: that's how karma works. Fontana used to be a steel town. Like all other American steel towns, it had fallen on hard times in the last, oh, thirty years or so. What this earthquake shows is that the answer to economic hard times is not and can never be to build a NASCAR track. That's what the people of Fontana did and now God has voiced his displeasure. When the firstborn sons of every family suddenly drop dead, don't say you weren't warned.

My second thought: minor local earthquake, no damage, no injuries. Finally! That super-depressing tsunami story is so over. Why would a news station carry a story about hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners again for like the 20th day in a row when they have a non-emergency local situation of utterly mundane and commonplace dimension to "team cover"? I mean, they laid out all that money for the fancy machine that makes the overlay title graphics. They might as well use it.

People think Californians all but ignore earthquakes, that we take them in our easy stride as part of our daily lives. This is not true. We simply get over them faster, assuming we are not lying at the bottom of a giant pile that used to be, say, an apartment block or a parking garage. Then it tends to keep your attention. But otherwise what you do when the shaking stops is call everyone you know and say "Did you feel it?" right before you play the Richter Scale game. That's a game where you randomly pick a number on the scale, the other person in the conversation does the same thing and then you take turns abusing each other for their obvious idiocy. And thus the nervous tension dissipates.

My dad is from Michigan, born and raised, still lives there. He was out once and we had a very, very minor--but noticeable--earthquake. It took several hours for him to regain his ability to speak and about four days for the color to return to his face. I had the same reaction the first time I ever visited him in winter, so geographically I guess we're even.

But like anyone else, Californians do exactly what you'd expect when an earthquake hits. We say things like "Oh holy fuck!" when the first BOOM! hits. If the first BOOM! hits and then fades away into a slow rattle, then you're OK. If there's a second BOOM!, you're in trouble. We do know we're supposed to stand in a doorway, something that sounds so stupid in times of clarity and geological stability, but suddenly seems eminently reasonable when your house is swaying. Of course it really makes as much sense as those old 1950s educational films that said you should flop down in a gutter and cover yourself in newspaper in the event of a nuclear attack. The idea, I guess, is to give the relief workers something to laugh about as they're climbing over the pile that used to be your house. "Hey Frank, take a look. Here's another dumb-fuck in a doorway. Heh heh. Let me know if you find the rest of his torso."

Topic shift, one last thing before the weekend:

Our kids are in Sunday school. We don't do it so much for the Jesus of it but mostly so the aren't in church with us during Mass, screaming out things like "my butt is itchy" (which they have) while the priest is up at the altar slitting the goat's throat.

Did I mention we were Catholic?

Anyway, at home my boys and I play this game where I lay on the floor and they all jump on me. It's fine with me since I don't have to move a whole lot. Basically it's a variation on a game they play call Smash Daddy's Testicles Flat. Essentially every game they play is a variation on that. I say they because at the same time, I'm playing a related but very different game called Protect My Junk From Pointy Kids' Knees. I don't always win.

How are these related? Well, recently when I've been laying on the floor, my three-year-old has been pulling my arms out straight, perpindicular to my body. Then he beats his little meatball fist against my palm, then does the same thing to the other arm/palm until I'm stretched out like a capital T. Then he announces: "There. I nailed you to a tree like Jesus and now you're going to die."

And I did.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 4.4 (in honor of my brethren in Fontucky)


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:39 AM