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happy earthquake day
15 years ago
21 years ago today, the earth shook hard in the San Francisco Bay area. It brought down sections of bridges and overpasses, cracked buildings, interrupted the World Series. Killed some people.
I was in college. My roommate was taking a nap, naked, on a wobbly loft bed, on the fourth and top floor of a giant rickety old house from the early 20th century.
As the house shook, he was buffeted painfully by my music collection, which was a mess of cassette tapes stacked on a high shelf.
It was worse for two other guys I knew in another old campus house. They had set up their "beers of the world" display not long before. This was like 250 empty bottles representing like 100 nations, all arranged uber-dorkily on home-made narrow shelves running all around their little double room. They were both pelted by bottles that broke against the rupturing walls and became flying glass shards.
I was doing my Computer Science homework in a lab (only the really rich kids came to college with their own computers back then). I'd just hit "Save" on my just-finished assignment. Then I was knocked out of my chair. Everyone scrambled under the plastic carrels that each housed a little MacSE, every screen now showing the little sad Mac face with the X's for eyes that was the device's too-precious way of saying that it was fucked.
I didn't scramble under anything. It was too amazing, the floor swinging that way, the giant plate glass windows bending and warping like giant soap bubbles. I sat and watched and hoped I wouldn't die. I thought of the giant Mexico City quake that had killed thousands.
Obviously, I didn't die. But after the quake I was better than that: I was transformed. It sounds silly and melodramatic now, but the quake was the moment I felt certain psychic fetters break, and I started to pursue my own happiness on my own terms for the first time. It wasn't really the quake itself, or even so much the friendships that solidified after. The quake marked with perfect poetry a transformation that probably would have happened anyway. The two are forever symbolically connected in my mind.
So today is sort of a personal holiday for me (with all respect to those who died, and who lost loved ones).
Happy Earthquake Day!
I was in college. My roommate was taking a nap, naked, on a wobbly loft bed, on the fourth and top floor of a giant rickety old house from the early 20th century.
As the house shook, he was buffeted painfully by my music collection, which was a mess of cassette tapes stacked on a high shelf.
It was worse for two other guys I knew in another old campus house. They had set up their "beers of the world" display not long before. This was like 250 empty bottles representing like 100 nations, all arranged uber-dorkily on home-made narrow shelves running all around their little double room. They were both pelted by bottles that broke against the rupturing walls and became flying glass shards.
I was doing my Computer Science homework in a lab (only the really rich kids came to college with their own computers back then). I'd just hit "Save" on my just-finished assignment. Then I was knocked out of my chair. Everyone scrambled under the plastic carrels that each housed a little MacSE, every screen now showing the little sad Mac face with the X's for eyes that was the device's too-precious way of saying that it was fucked.
I didn't scramble under anything. It was too amazing, the floor swinging that way, the giant plate glass windows bending and warping like giant soap bubbles. I sat and watched and hoped I wouldn't die. I thought of the giant Mexico City quake that had killed thousands.
Obviously, I didn't die. But after the quake I was better than that: I was transformed. It sounds silly and melodramatic now, but the quake was the moment I felt certain psychic fetters break, and I started to pursue my own happiness on my own terms for the first time. It wasn't really the quake itself, or even so much the friendships that solidified after. The quake marked with perfect poetry a transformation that probably would have happened anyway. The two are forever symbolically connected in my mind.
So today is sort of a personal holiday for me (with all respect to those who died, and who lost loved ones).
Happy Earthquake Day!
