East Coast Earthquake

 

The thing is, I did not feel the earthquake that has so discombobulated the East Coast this morning, Really. I did not feel the thing at all. I was sitting in my comfortable chair at work minding my own business and the earth moved and I did not realize that the earth had moved. Having missed the earth moving, I simply went on with my bureaucratic life as if nothing had happened because for me, nothing had. Well, better luck next time, I suppose. And that was that, or at least that was what I thought. 

Apparently, not feeling the earth move during an earthquake is a sign of diminished mental capacity. People kept coming into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and demanding to know how I coped with the great East Coast earthquake of 2024 and were deeply shocked that I coped with the massive catastrophe by not realizing it was happening at the time. Now, I would understand this lack of insight on my part if the quake was an event on the order of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923—it would take several deep hits off of a very large bong with incredibly strong weed to ignore disasters as large as those—but it wasn’t; from what I understand the quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which several people from California have assured me is the planetary version of mild heartburn and not something to be worried about at all. Trees shook, plates rattled, pets were perturbed, and that was about it. The East Coast has hurricanes that do all of that and more, and in the winter we have nor’easters that leave you and yours up to your backsides in freezing cold mucky water, an altogether unpleasant experience. I am still pumping water out of my cellar from our last meteorological misadventure.

My guess is that it was the novelty of this intense non-disaster that has impressed itself on everyone’s mind. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes here in the Vampire State; the last one that I remember hereabouts was when the Attorney General managed to push the Governor out of office on sexual harassment charges, which people tell me is not the same thing at all, although I am certain that it was the same thing to the Governor. He was planning to run for re-election for the umpteenth time, but as Mr. Burns says, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley. For years I had no clue what an agley was; I thought an agley was some sort of French cookie before an out of breath Scottish tourist stumbled into this place looking for a men's room and told me what it meant in the post-micturation interview where I told him how to get to the train station.

Be that as it may, many of the patrons of this mycological sinkhole regarded my insensitivity to the travails of Mother Earth as somewhat odd, given their own traumatic experiences, but I must say that insensitivity to what is going on around me is something people have been accusing me of for more years than I care to remember. The accusers are usually women, for some reason or another, teachers and librarians and other strange females that I became involved with in bars who decided that they did not like me anymore. I was never sure what the problem was, but it was usually something about not paying attention to their feelings. I thought I was paying attention, but my perception was clearly off as I am an insensitive lout. I know that because people, and by people I mean women, keep telling me that I am and who am I to argue with such a widespread and deeply held opinion? I do wish, however, that my mother would stop agreeing with them. It's an uncomfortable feeling when a boy can't be sure that his mom has his back.