A Storm to Remember, now November

It’s Movember— I mean, November, the next month.
’Better get crackin’ on manually reading those other blogs I can’t follow ’cause my reader’s swamped.  ’Good thing I stuffed a bunch of URLs into a single text file, right?  And if Homeland Security misunderstands my use of ‘dirty bomb,’ …I guess I’m screwed ’cause I can’t afford a good attorney.

What was this post supposed to be about, again?
…Oh, yeah, detailing as much as I can, the past couple of days.  Le sh*tstorm.

Oh, and Spank Material for the Clinically Insane has reached Chapter 6.

Insomnia and a Hurricane

Before “Frankenstorm” Sandy (and what a nice name for loads of flooding) hit the North East, my lousy day, with even more of a decline in health, would stay with me into the night.  I thought I could deal with my work in the morning, so this time I put in some effort to actually sleep at night.  But a small case of insomnia occurred.

Insomnia, that condition that starts with an obsession of floating unfinished business around in your mind to the point that when you attempt to empty it, only calculated thoughts appear.  In other words, no dreams, no actual sleep.  I had my eyes closed, and time would pass into a blur, but still I was conscious.

The good news is I eventually slept the next day.  If the sleeplessness had persisted, the sickness would become more physiological, as the brain’s chemical production for unconsciousness and paralysis would further malfunction.

The bad news is that I slept through the only window I had before so much was closed on account of the hurricane.  New York’s Mike Bloomberg closed the subways at 4 p.m. prior to the flooding of a number of them, and an audience of only about a hundred showed for the taping of Late Show with David Letterman.  The USM system here was also closed at 4 p.m., and remained so the next day.

The 50+ MPH wind currents tore down a large branch, leaving it straight in the middle of our long driveway, blocking all ability to drive further inward.  That branch requires you to hurdle over it in order to walk through.  It wasn’t until the end of October that everything died down, dead, heads spun around and creepy children on swings sung a different version of the Bubonic Plague-inspired Ring Around the Rosy.

Onto Finishing That Book

With the electrical power being so unreliable during the worst of hurricane Sandy’s hard winds & rain prevented me from even thinking about starting up the computer.  The power did indeed go out for a few of seconds a couple of times.  And since I wasn’t in the mood to write or rewrite with the scraps of paper I have, my options were limited.

And so, I would start to finish reading the first novel by Michael Chabon, written on a 4MHz Z80A machine with a tiny green-phosphor screen. Chabon recounts in the back of the book having to be propped up in an uncomfortable position to reach the keys.  That’s what writing is all about.

I’m not much of a reader (or a writer), but this book was worth it.  Along with the list of circumstances set by the storm, leaving a big hole in plans, my imagination was filled with appreciated wonder; it became a dream.  It’s exciting that it doesn’t stretch and stretch like modern thrillers, and it abbreviates obvious elements where those giant novels needlessly drag on.

The reason why I couldn’t get past the first nine chapters of Leonid Tolstoy’s War and Peace was first due to the exhausting nature at which arrogant “high classness” would be beaten to death, page after page in its description, and second due to the book accidentally being dropped on the ground, ruined by the wet winter a few years back.

The timing of rain keeping people up allowed me to read the book aloud in the morning. The initial wonder of the characters led me to practice their voices, try out their described accents, such as Jane Bellwether’s southern drawl, with added syllables, as the first-person Arthur describes.  And I misspelled “Pittsburgh” every time.

Twitter Looting & Leftovers

My own social cigarette addendum Frankensocial was a bit insensitive, as I wrote it at the expensive of Canada, finishing on the day of a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in western-Canada.  I didn’t know of the quake until hours later, busy…doing all this here, not reading the news, but— no more excuses.

Via twitter, Brooklyn came under an additional storm of looting, with mobs overwhelming authorities, some using the roof of a liquor store to steal liquor during heightened security. Televisions were stolen in broad daylight, and candy for Halloween.  Many just went in and went out, and the press are reluctant to report on it.