“Ever read any Poe?”
“No, but I loved her last album.”
— “Panic Room”
Raining and warm this early Tuesday on California’s north coast — we’re forecast for wet weather for the next week-to-10-days, so I might as well get used to it.
A horror I talked about yesterday morning — a possible cracked head gasket in my Jeep Comanche — turned out to be bogus, and to my most-wonderful, weeping self, a reprieve from having to walk to work in the rain.
I took the Jeep to my longtime mechanic (he brought the truck back from the dead five years ago and has worked on it since, calls his business, ‘The Car Whisperer‘) and after an examination declared no problem.
(Illustration: Poe-tic license of M.C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere‘ found here).
The guy has always looked to me just like the actor, Liam Neeson, and is most-likely the best, most trustworthy mechanic I’ve ever come across ( a necessity for a mechanical idiot like me) and the few times when he couldn’t find anything wrong, didn’t charge me a dime.
What would you do, if Liam Neeson told you in an emphatic voice, “Drive it!”
You’d get in that freakin’ truck and go! That’s what you’d do, and you’d do it quickly, and happily.
Later on yesterday morning while at work doing bookwork at the liquor store I manage, a sense of shame, a kind of regret for the cry-baby attitude I’d had with the Jeep. Oh, my! Woe is me! Woe is me! Despite the rain, I’m in easy walking distance to the store, and there’s no real horror in my life (other than constant worry about my five grown kids acting dumb), and the self-pity made me wonder about the reality of it all.
A goodly chunk of humanity is going through the shits right now.
Up in Washington state, a massive landslide north of Seattle has already claimed 14 lives, and more than a hundred people are still missing — what a horror:
“I’m very disappointed to tell you that we didn’t find any sign of any survivors, and we found no survivors today,” Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots told reporters Monday evening.
“The situation is very grim.”
And way-unpleasant, too, are the emotions of friends/family of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which authorities said had most-likely crashed into a remote part of the Indian Ocean:
“We have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived,” Malaysian Airlines told family members of the missing passengers.
Relatives, hanging on to the last-possible thread, still want proof the plane actually went down there. One bizarre story, though.
Meanwhile, aid workers and health officials in the west African nation of Guinea are fighting the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, which has already killed at least 59 people — and now the disease, one of the world’s most virulent and deadly, might be coming to somewhere near you:
“All we know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who travelled from a country where these diseases occur,” Denise Werker, joint director of health in Saskatchewan province in western Canada, said on Monday.
Further tests are needed to be certain, but this ain’t a pretty picture, either.
And the list of bad shit goes on and on — and not from just news stores from all over, but in our personal lives. Friends die, get sick, divorce, and go through life with way-more crap on their shoulders than I could even comprehend.
It hurts to realize you’re such a huge, atomic-powered cry baby.