Behold the Power of The Blog: about a minute ago, BOOM BOOM BOOM, the house shook three times, and the dog started barking frantically. (Note to Dog: your kind is supposed to be able to sense earthquakes before they happen. I thought that you were strange because you don't like Nacho Cheese Doritos but you do like peas. You need to get with the program, Dog.)
Before the quake, I was busy doing the business of blogging: emailing my new ad provider, updating the Facebook, and then BOOM BOOM BOOM. In earthquake-speak, there are Rollers (ground rolls) and Shakers (ground shakes or sometimes even jumps). This was a Boomer. It sound like an artillery strike, or maybe the passage in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which he describes the sound that the end of the world makes. A string of low booms on the horizon, something like that.
Earthquakes freak the shit out of people who don't live in California. This makes me laugh. Floods, cantaloupe-sized hail, hurricanes, tornados. We don't have those. They have 'em all the time. To us the rest of the country is like the post-nuclear America depicted in the classic film Damnation Alley. I'll bet they have giant scorpions and man-eating cockroaches too, only they don't tell outsiders about them, because that would be the last straw, we'd build a giant wall around California, and the mutants and the apocalypse-weather would be sealed out forever. And then that wall would eventually be converted into a giant dome. And then we'd all get crystals embedded in our palms and when we turned 30, the crystals would go black and then we'd be vaporized in a colorful ceremony, our final breathing moments spent floating above the crowds, awash in their applause, the death rays burning through our hearts.
Anyway, it wasn't a bad earthquake. I'm fine. Thanks for asking.
(UPDATE: one of my Tweeple has informed me that it was not, in fact, an earthquake; it was the Marines at Camp Pendleton blowing shit up. I apologize for any mass hysteria that I may have caused; to the good people at Best Buy, that was me looting your store, and I will return the Blu-Ray players and the washing machine as soon as possible.)
