I went to bed early last night after a big dinner, a cold Sapporo, and a few episodes of the Mighty Boosh. Then, at some point, around 1am I was roused from a deep sleep by sound and movement. My initial inclination was to think that the characters from Mighty Boosh, who I had conjured up in a recent dream, were now in my room shaking my bed and continuing the conversation from my dream undisturbed. It didn’t take me more than a split-second to realize this was untrue, but I still thought there was somebody in my room and I was really frightened. It became obvious after one or two more split-seconds that I was alone in my room, with the gentle sound of my belongings shimmying back and forth, in the middle of my first earthquake. It was a wee-little one, so don’t worry. Nothing even fell over.
I guess that’s something I’ll have to get used to around here, like tornadoes in the mid-west or tsunami’s in Asia. I hopped online this morning to make sure I didn’t imagine it, and yes, according to blogging.la, there was a “magnitude 4.5 event” around Chatsworth, CA (about 25 miles north).
I’m gonna pretend that was the powers that be, grabbing me by the mattress and giving me a good shake, as thought to say: “Get off your ass and do something!” True, I’ve been slightly inert since I returned from San Diego, mostly tending to domestic things and other errands, watching Art:21 on DVD and napping regularly. I’m feeling the urge to re-enter an exploratory state of mind. Though, to be quite honest, i’m beginning to feel the limits of where buses can take me around here. I wonder how long it will be until I hit a standstill? Hopefully by that point I’ll have met more people with cars.. :/
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Yeah, the earthquakes were a bit surprising for me at first when I got here, though more amusing than terrifying. Like “Ah, the four PM train, right on schedule, as always. Wait, I don’t live by any trains. Oh!” or “That’s odd; this toilet is more forcefully shaky than usual. I may not be able to hold on. Ah… I see. I’d better go check my bookshelf.” I never quite realized what was going on till just as it ended, and then always with a note of pleasure, a desire to re-experience the thing.
But then the one that woke me up from my sleep a few weeks ago, my god, I was sure that hell had erupted on Earth and I was dying. In conjunction with my dream-delirium, I think the factor that really disturbed me was the quake’s boom coinciding (no doubt causally) with the sudden onset of a car alarm in the distance. To me, this was somehow clear portent of the apocalypse, the world sliding now into its final days of anarchy.
Actually, what’s interesting is that I think I also had a “There’s a person in my room” vibe going on at the time, too; some sort of instinctual reaction to being woken up so suddenly, perhaps. I could feel my semiconscious brain battling it out as I stared, unable to steadily focus, out from my bed at (to the extent that it was _at_ anything) the door: “There’s someone in the room, and he’s a Bad Guy”, “What? That doesn’t make sense; I can’t see anyone. On what grounds do you make your claim?”, “No time to explain; just trust me on this, his intentions are no good and if you don’t help me hide, we’re totally fucked”, “Oh god! I hope he doesn’t think to look in the bed!”
Comment by Sridhar August 15, 2007 @ 2:30 am