Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season

Hey, everybody, it’s My First Hurricane!

This is an extremely typical me-scenario: Live on a sandbar for a year, and the sea stands quiet. Move to the middle of the state, and all aquatic hell breaks loose.

Flipper, who works for The Mouse On Water, keeps calling with hurricane updates from Disney Cruise Lines. They have an actual terror-alert like hurricane system out there, ranging from 5 (“All clear. Continual nominal monetary rape of tourists.”) to 1 (“Actual hurricane in progress. Close parks; charge $12,897,314,863,946 per poncho.”) I’m taking her word for whatever she tells me, because Disney runs at least the first seven planets from the sun and their radar can clearly kick the ass of NORAD’s radar.

He’s a certifiable hurricane now, Charley is. This has nothing to do with wind speed and everything to do with the fact that the first Local Neighborhood Dip has painted “CHARLEY GO AWAY” on his storm shutters. This was rapidly followed by the local news shooting footage of people fleeing out of various WalMarts with armloads of plastic and tuna; we now, therefore, officially have a Weather Event on our hands.

My Hurricane Preparedness will pretty much consist of throwing a shower curtain into my car. I was planning on doing this anyway, for the Millennium Bellemobile continues to suffer from incontinence, but with Charley on the way it looks as if her peeing problem will upgrade from Occasional Tinkling to Post-Four Rum and Cokes Status.

At last Weather Channel check, Charley was a Category II bearing down on Cuba, which frankly doesn’t concern me—what the hell is there to destroy in Cuba? What’s it going to wipe out, one of Castro’s lithium crystal Commodore 64’s? If anything, a hurricane is going to leave that craphole looking better.

The lack of anything to do in Cuba, it seems, is going to do nothing but piss Charley off, because people who know far more about hurricanes than I do are hopping from foot to foot screeching about the storm “regaining strength” right after it rams through the fields of fatigues.

It’s very surreal times here in the swamp, because the general attitude towards hurricanes here is, and I quote, “Pfffffft.” My friendboy Andy, a native Floridian, actually had to explain to me via IM why it might not be a good idea to uphold our plans to have an Olympics Opening Ceremony Ripping Party tomorrow night. “Um, I really don’t feel like driving on an interstate in 105 MPH winds,” he typed. “Just wait until you see the horizontal clouds come in.”

“What will they look like?” I asked.

“////,” he said.

Well, this I gotta see. I am eager to lose my “////” cloud virginity. We didn’t have those in Ohio. The only clouds I had to worry about in Ohio looked like this: “V”

This has all been preceded, of course, by the Parade of the Television Weather Asshats, who seem to enjoy finding the crappiest weather on Earth and standing in the middle of it. Because radar and remote cameras are never to be trusted. They must verify it for themselves.

“WELL IT’S CERTAINLY WINDY OUT HERE, BOB!! YES INDEED, REALLY REALLY SUPER WINDY! ALMOST AS IF THERE’S A HURRICANE OR SOMETHING GOING ON!” They say these things with golf umbrellas in hand, because when rain is slanting horizontally and you can’t stand upright, what you want in your immediate vicinity is a long pointy object with a metal tip.

“Calm down, little storm,” our receptionist said when she heard the most recent updates. Our receptionist is The Shit, and she will tell you that she is The Shit, so if Charley is going to listen to anybody, it’s going to be her.