A twister story

So, originally, my plan for last night was to blog about how badly daylight savings screwed up my day. The post was to be appropriately titled “Spring forward” — a more than predictable rant on how I wouldn’t mind another hour of nighttime if it allowed me just another hour to sleep in.

I was halfway through my post — which was kind of unimpressive in that I just used a lot of contrived run-on sentences and the repeated use of the word “fuck”, but people would have found it entertaining anyway because people LOVE me — when the lights went out in my apartment. And stayed out.

I didn’t even get to save the post I was writing on.

At around 7 PM last night, I might as well have been a little kid hearing Santa’s sleigh bells on the roof of the house, because as soon as the sky got dark in a hurry and the first window-rattling crack of thunder was followed by ominous tornado sirens, my eyes lit up in pure excitement. Instead of crawling under my desk to duck and cover, I eagerly ran outside to see my first ever real live tornado.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any tornados (although I’ve heard that one did indeed touch down a couple miles away). What I did get to witness, however, kind of looked like the end of the world for a few minutes. It was eerily darker outside than I had ever seen before, and whenever I did briefly see things — during the moments that lightning lit up the sky — I saw small tree branches and debris flying through the air, and dangling power lines whipping around. And it was so windy out, I wanted nothing more but to have a microphone and cameraman with me, to be like one of those crazy daredevil CNN reporters that like to stand in the middle of hurricanes.

Tornado and ambulance sirens everywhere, the wind howling, my clothes flapping wildly — it was just... awesome. It was anarchy in the U-C.

I happily spun around in circles with my hands in the air like I was Winona Ryder in the movie Edward Scissorhands.

Nearby, just a block away, there was a loud crash which was so deafening that I decided it was time for me to go back inside. As usual, my spidey sense turned out to be correct; I later learned that the loud crash was the roof coming off of a car wash on University Ave.

It’s so odd to me that I’m fascinated by destruction. I remember five years ago when watching news coverage of the 9/11 attacks, a part of me thought it was kind of neat to see footage of people running on the streets from the cloud of smoke and ashes. I remember seeing the death count increase every hour and feeling sick in shame because a part of me wanted to see the number continue to go up and up in the same way that fans enjoy watching their sports teams run up the score in blow-out games.

Later that night when I was at Grainger Library chatting online to a couple friends, I asked them all if they thought it was strange that I always fantasize about the end of the world. To my surprise and somewhat relief, each and every one of them share the same excitement as me. We talked about what our weapons of choice would be if zombies took over the world and we had to seek refuge inside a shopping mall. If my memory serves me correct, Jeff would use a crossbow, Dave would handle a pair of swords, Dan would have a high-powered assault rifle, and Johnny would use an axe. Me, I’m a shotgun kind of guy; I enjoy combat from close-range and I love the drama of reloading your gun every five seconds as zombies claw their way towards you.

Back to the tornado. Not everything about it was all fun and games. I went grocery shopping yesterday afternoon for the first time in weeks, and fully reloaded my fridge with all kinds of goodies. About $60 worth of goodies. Well, because of the tornado and the subsequent 10-hour power outage that followed, all of the food in my fridge went bad. The milk: sour. The ground beef: brown and sticky. The tub of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough icecream: nothing more than a puddle of waste.

I did happen to salvage my beer, however. Realizing that all of my beer would be ruined if I let them continue to thaw, I sat alone in the darkness of my room and chugged down about eight Rolling Rocks until about 4 in the morning. It was fun, no matter how shitty I felt this morning.

And if the end of the world ever does come during my lifetime, I hope that it’ll be zombies instead of a really windy night. I’ll be waiting with my shotgun, or better yet a BFG-9000 with the ID-CLIP command.