Time To Close the Shutters

This just in from the National Weather Service: ATTENTION, STATE OF FLORIDA. BEND OVER.

Oh my my, oh hell yes, baby put on that party dress, ‘cause here comes Frances. Bitch.

Let us celebrate:

-On Friday, I was granted a Hurricane Day from the Evil Boring Day Job, which I put to efficient good use by sleeping eleven hours and then calling Flipper at her job to say “So, how’s WORK today? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!” I know she appreciated this.

-The Kennedy Space Center, for the first time in the history of ever, has shut down and evacuated, which means that my former subcontractor has doubtless stayed behind to keep the gift shop open and run for-pay premium tours out to the launchpads so people can watch the service towers blow over. Nick the NASA Poobah has evacuated to Georgia or some such godawful place, most likely to spare himself being forced to paddle a busfull of German tourists past the Vehicle Assembly Building. I am completely devastated over the fact that these people will be losing approximately one hillion jillion dollars of Labor Day revenue this weekend.

You know, when I first decided to knock my head off trying to get a job at KSC, I sat down with a hurricane map that detailed every single storm that had made landfall on the central Eastern coast in the past 150 years. Relocating to Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral seemed a very safe gamble, as there hadn’t been a storm that far north since, like, 1897.

Until, of course, I moved here. (Perhaps you now understand why I, a professional Thoroughbred racing journalist, never actually bet.) I have passed the past two days in a constant state of cringe on behalf of my old stomping grounds. The Cape just went through a tornado warning and Cocoa Beach is experiencing a twelve-foot storm surge, which essentially drowns out my very first big-girl, living-on-my-own apartment. I feel terrified for my recent place of address, the entirety of which was constructed over a span of forty-five minutes in 1958 when NASA moved in. The place is a Weather Channel Extreme Storm Special just waiting to happen.

By the way, Weather Channel? Thanks. Thanks for the gigantic PhotoShop graphics explaining storm surge, which consisted of a huge wall of blue completely obliterating rows and rows of Monopoly-sized houses. I felt a lot better after seeing that.

One of the local affiliates sent a Roving Asshat to cover the carnage in Cocoa Beach, which was tastefully intercut with footage of the Daytona Beach Pier crinkling up like Tinker Toys during Hurricane Floyd. They broadcast next to the Cocoa Beach Pier, and the waves and waves and waves were really enjoying ripping my heart out.

I have a major league emotional attachment to the Pier, which is where, as a spring-breaking senior in college, I first decided to one day move here. It was the Pier I stared at as I knelt on the floor looking at Florida maps and photos and online camera feeds in the first numb and pillow-screaming days when I was dumped out of a very serious relationship and decided that yes, I really would move here. It was the Pier where I walked and ran and sat in contemplation when I lived a half-mile from it in those first headrushy days when I was collecting a paycheck to talk about space all day. And it was the boards of the Pier that I walked, selling roses at midnight on weekends so I could afford to keep that job. To lose the Pier would be to lose a very good, very creaky friend. My heart has four homes: Cincinnati, the mountains of Colorado, the Womb. And the Pier. Godspeed, Pier.

Then again, as with every shitstorm in life, there is a potential rainbow at the end of it. Perhaps if the Pier goes, it will take the WORST. BAND. EVER. along with it.

-From the Department of You Live, You Learn: I went to Publix to collect yet another shower curtain for Bellemobile Diapering Purposes, expecting to see the Enntemann’s cart desolate and panicked over, and instead I found piles and piles of cinnamon rolls and coffee cakes. They’d stocked up for this. It was sandbagging, bakery aisle-style. And thus was utter breakdown of social order avoided.

-The management of my apartment complex took charge of the whole natural disaster situation by closing the leasing office and chucking everybody’s patio furniture into the pool. I cannot wait to go swimming again, luxuriating in the knowledge that I am floating in waters mixed with beach chair grit and the suntan lotion molecules from the asses of untold numbers of corpulent strangers.

-This whole area is under a night-hour curfew, which is not nearly so disturbing as the fact that all alcohol sales have been suspended. That is government for you: When you most need a drink, away goes the Schnapp’s. BOOOOOOOOOOOO, GA’BAGE!!

-Judging by the footage I saw out of Hollywood Beach, the fabulous Holiday Inn I stayed in while covering the Eclipse Awards is currently underwater. This has likely resulted in an improvement in the condition of lobby furniture.

-Best Hurricane Francis Quote thus far goes to my new boyfriend, the meteorologist on the NBC affiliate. He was speaking over footage of some assclown attempting to surf 4000-foot waves at Daytona Beach, and he pointed at the Asshat of the Hour and said, “This guy? Is a freak.”

-The national networks, whose general attitude seems to be “Sucks To Be You, Florida,” keep wringing their hands over The Mood of those of us in Frances’ path. Here’s a general assessment of The Mood, America: We’re pissed. We’re pissed, but it’s a weary, head-shaking kind of pissed, best summed up by Flipper: “Son of a bitch. You know?”

-We also have no idea what to do here. This thang is so world-endingly enormous that there really is nowhere to go to avoid it without temporarily relocating to Australia. This morning, I saw the people in the apartment below mine evacuating, piling pillows and blankets and Froot Loops into the backseat of their minivan. And next door, somebody was unloading suitcases from the trunk of a station wagon, evacuating into the building.

-Sliver medal in the Hurricane Francis Quote Olympics goes to the Fox affiliate newscaster who said, “The rain is entering every opening it can find.”

-The bronze is hereby awarded to a CBS meteorologist gazing upon a radar image: “Look at this strip, man.”

-How bad is it to have one major hurricane directly on the heels of another? This bad:

1) I walked around today taking pictures of the storm prep, (this hurricane has given unto me the sight of My First Sandbags!) and I certainly hope I can distinguish them from the Charley photographs, which are on the same roll of film.

2) On Thursday my sister called to annouce that she had received a hurricane present I sent to Jim the Baby Nephew (because every baby needs a hurricane present), which was a little outfit printed with the words “MY AUNT SURVIVED HER FIRST HURRICANE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY OUTFIT.” Four hours later downtown Orlando was evacuated—again. Jim’s next hurricane present will say “THE LORD GOD IS CLEARLY ATTEMPTING TO BLOW MY AUNT OUT OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA.”

3) There is still so much yard crap hanging around from Charley that Orange County set up a debris collection site with an entire armada of woodchippers in the parking lot of the Citrus Bowl. If you thought we had an overabundance of mulch before, you should see it about a week from now. We will be able to construct Disney-style topiaries out of woodchips for at least the next seventeen presidential administrations.

-My roller rink, which is the parking lot of a middle school across the street, is now functioning as a Red Cross Disaster Center, and the place is crawling with the cars of do-gooders. So, no skating today. Screw you, Red Cross. Don’t you know I rollerblade there? Get your priorities straight.

-An internet news story on the hurricane was just filed by a person named "Frances Kerry," whom I’d like to nominate to the Appropriately Named For Current Events Hall of Fame.

-The thing with getting a day off work is, you become greedy about it. We probably would have had Monday off anyway despite the holiday weekend. This sucks. I would like my have-it-anyway day off as well, to be taken at my leisure.

This runs in the family: My grandfather took a vacation day to escort my mother and uncles to an amusement park, and all of a sudden they heard that the Japanese had surredered to end World War II. The whole city was sent home in celebration, and until the year he died my grandfather would shake his head, saying, "I never got that day back." Word, Grandpa.

-I saw a live televised shot of the completely empty boat slips in Port Canaveral. This was very disconcerting, as I am accustomed to the sight of my fifty-yard yacht in its handsomely appointed parking space.

-No wonder Charley and Frances waited for me to move down here before they showed up. These storms and I have done some very serious bonding. I am not, as you may have gathered, known for my balanced nature. The ocean seems to feed off of this, because the mere fact of existing as Category 4's isn’t enough for these hurricanes; no, they have to be extreme hurricanes. Charley moved through much faster and tighter than your average hurricane, and Frances is way larger and way slower than usual. You’re welcome, Florida.

-One of the meteorologists was just all, “This just in from the National Weather Service! We have a flood warning for the following areas…” and then reeled off a list of every single county from here to Salt Lake City. What’s that you say? A flood, during a hurricane? Get right out of town!

-Part of the aforementioned pissiness may be attributed to a hurricane phenomenon known as “Screw You, As Opposed To Me.” This is manifested when people in one part of the state roots for a hurricane to slam into another part of the state so as to avoid Charley woodchip conditions for them personally. It truly is humanity at its best.

-This week’s Weather Channel Five-Day Forecast have been most delightful. They looked like this:

THURSDAY: Mostly sunny, chance of afternoon showers
FRIDAY: Early morning fog
SATURDAY: Huge catastrophic world-ending hurricane
SUNDAY: Partly cloudy

-Surrealality Update: Since my late childhood, I have marked time by watching the steady disappearance of the hair of a Cincinnati meteorologist named Tim Hedrick, who in between the occasional tornado performs such vital weather activities as holding grillouts on the top of the news building and shoving a ruler into the ground in the process of various snowstorms. Well, tonight one of the Roving Asshats was screaming into the wind that he’d brought in a “weather expert” in to explain just where all this horizontal rain was coming from, and into the shot heaved… Tim Hedrick! Stylin’ Channel 12 windbreaker and all! Sail on, Steadily Balding Tim.

-The local affiliates have been completely dumping regular programming since Thursday, which has led to such tremendous media meta-crapping events as the one I experienced yesterday morning, when NBC broke into the local affiliate’s Continuous Special Report with a network Immediate Special Report on President Clinton’s medical condition. There was scary update drum music flying all over the place, bouncing back and forth in a cross-mojination of journalistic panic that I fully expected to rupture the universe right open.

The fact that the affiliates have been continuously on the air for the past 72 hours is beginning to tell on these people. They’ve been rotating their meteorologists on a punishing basis. Once the first-string, prime time meteorologists dropped, the second-teamers and weekend anchors were brought in, followed by the Weather Substitutes consisting of the drooling and the underage, followed by tourists bused in from the “Listen To the Land” exhibit at EPCOT.

-The tremendous size and the ridiculous slowness of this storm, which has been zipping along with all the speed of a governmental agricultural investigation, have made this entire experience like waiting for a baby to be born—an enormous, wet, windy baby capable of tearing away your internet access for weeks and weeks. The widely spaced feeder bands are obnoxious little labor pains. You just want the messiness, the crying, and the endless pushing over with. For a while the damn thing actually stopped off the coast, just sitting there spinning on its ass. Footage from the coast was showing the tops of street signs twisting back and forth like they were shaking their heads "no." We were originally told that this thing would be smacking Orlando by late on Friday, and yet here I sit at two in the morning on Sunday with rain no worse than a normal Florida summer storm. I told you Frances was a bitch.

-The other day I wrote about the President’s acceptance speech, but most of Florida, I have a feeling, has no idea it even took place. We are too busy diapering our cars and snatching up our Enntemann’s to concern ourselves with IRS reform and misty video clips of waving flags and flying fastballs. Under the fold of today’s Orlando Slantinal, waaaaay the hell under the fold, was a rather blurry picture of the President next to a review of the speech, which was, as you can imagine, just glowing, so perhaps it’s best for W that the people of Orange County were greeted with the somewhat less alarming four-inch headlines of “MILLIONS FLEEING” and “HERE IT COMES” on the 6AM doorstep.

-One more Shining Media Moment for the road: They’re officially out of metaphors, now. One of the meteorologists, in an attempt to put a 40 MPH wind gust in perspective, said: “Here’s what you do. Get in your car, and drive forty miles an hour. Then put your hand out the window—well, maybe you should have a friend drive, and then you can put your hand out the window. It will probably feel pretty breezy."

This was immediately followed by a cut to a woman in Melbourne holding a Hefty bag into the stiff breeze. “SEE HOW THIS PLASTIC BAG IS FLAPPING!” she yelled. “YOU CAN REALLY TELL HOW WINDY IT IS!” I was awed, as very thin sheets of plastic are much renowned for their ability to withstand enormous gusts of wind.

-Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey gets the “Most Heartily Screwed By Frances Before She Even Got Here” award. This man is famous for his utter inability to rack up any respectable injuries. Other jockeys snap legs, bash heads into the turf, and get arms pulled out of their sockets, but not Jerry, who we in the racing world have simply assumed will continue to ride and ride and ride without so much as a hangnail, forever.

Well, last week Jerry was sidelined for a month by a broken arm sustained when he fell off a ladder putting up storm shutters. Irony, thy name is Bailey.

-Yesterday, I felt a disturbance in the Force to the south, and then I flipped to a national Fox feed to see… Geraldo Rivera. This angered me, as I was under the serene impression that he had been left behind from war coverage in Afghanistan to interview rocks. I am now rooting for the hurricane.