Over at the Voodoo Cafe, Rice is complaining about the rain. It's the hurricanes, Rice, the damn things will lay it on you every time. Actually, she's quite charming and funny and has lots of sharp knives, so click on her link (off to the right and down, I'm too lazy to re-load it.)
I'm glad my sister is up in DFW, a shipping destination for refugees from Galveston; and Rice is in Midland, also well inland (as you may have surmised by its name. Scroll down for the even more descriptive town titles, like Old Dime Box.)
It's totally fucking late. I said goodnight to my last email pal over an hour ago, and then made the mistake of having a snack and reading the Times for a while -- now I'm depressed and re-energized all at once. But the hurricane news is always big this time of year, and this decade, and the Times carries lots of it. Think for example about the guys who work offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf. There are over 700 platforms out there, and they're only evacuating 400 of them. Because the others have been reinforced and rebuilt since Katrina. Can you imagine squatting on an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf under sustained winds of 131 miles per hour or greater? Now obviously these guys are not literally outside, lashed to the deck or something. But still. I'd feel like that man and his son who floated in the ocean off Florida for more than 24 hours, treading water and waiting for sharks. Stranded out there on your (by comparison) teeny tiny lonesome, waiting for a monster with 150-foot waves to come and crush your oil rig like an aluminum can; like a bunch of sailors in a busted sub. Shitty.
Not that it's any more fun to be a drowning Haitian. Or even someone about to lose their million-dollar home in Pirates Beach TX, I suppose, though I feel somewhat less sorry for those people. Pray, pray -- hurricanes are a big mystery, in many ways, despite the best efforts of science. Heather, stay in Euless! The coast is pretty, but the rain will eventually win the war.
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