1:30 Wake Up Call

This morning I was dreaming of this lagoon or bay. I was watching some kind of engineering event, and they were sinking an aircraft carrier. As they sunk it in this lagoon, it produced a massive whirlpool.

I watched and wondered if anyone had anticipated this, as it seemed the whirlpool was sucking in all the boats moored along the docks and anchored further out in the shallows. (How could you sink an aircraft carrier in a shallow lagoon? Dream physics, I guess.)

I worried about the sharks. There was some kind of problem with the sharks attacking people in all of this.

At some point in this I finally gave up and woke up to answer my phone, which had been ringing constantly for about half an hour.

I checked the number, half expecting it to be some random drug addled or drunken friend who was about to get told off for SRS. When I saw it was my mom's number, my first thought was "Who's dead?"

I called her up and, bless her heart, she was making sure that I knew TEH TSUNAMI WUT WAS COMING TO GETZ ME.

I spent the next 15 minutes with my my iPad, my t.v., and my one good eye half open, checking every major news outlet and weather report and reassuring my mom that I was not in imminent danger and that it really was okay for me to go back to sleep.

I think she would have preferred that I responded by jumping in my car and driving east as fast as possible. However, I'm pretty sure my place of employment wouldn't have appreciated that, as it is business as usual today. (Or IS it? The office is strangely empty).

And anyhoo, I just would have driven to Vegas. And I can't afford that right now.

It's nice to know that my mom still loves me. Even at 1:30 in the morning.

************

A note on part of the reason why I don't watch the news anymore: newscasters are bloodthirsty, drooling, vuluturish little trolls.

I can't bear watching their eyes light up as they cross the line from reporting the same scant facts over and over to speculating on the bounty of possible horrors to come. Like children peering at a candy display and smearing their already grubby hands on display case, fogging up the glass with their anticipatory pants of breath--they salivate over not just what has been wrought but the possible carnage to come.

The worst are the portions of "talent" that are generally the most useless. I swear, the CNN weatherman was popping wood as he described the terrible weather battering Hawaii, and the the unpredictable nature of tides and weather behavior in such conditions. His eyes were alight as he pointed out possibility after possibility, each more dire than the next.

One of the regular anchors interrupted him to voice the only logical thought in the ten minutes of catastrophe masturbation that made up this chunk of television: what could the folks along the CA coast expect? What areas would be affected?

The weather-douche stammered and stuttered about, again, the UNPREDICTABILITY of all this and how we could all, hypothetically, be IN TERRIBLE PERIL. Then he quietly conceded that local authorities would be advising the CA residents on what to do. This saved him the embarrassment of having to report the actual facts that no major inundation is expected, and last report showed swells increased by a maximum of 12 inches.

These people are parasites on par with the paparazzi and the gossip hounds that chase around cracked out starlets and cover Anna Nicole's death for weeks on end. Actually, there used to be a difference between a newscaster and a tabloid journalist. Now they are one and the same.

They are all fear mongers, rubberneckers who wallow in filth and tragedy, social arsonists who fan the flames of hysteria under the guise of providing information services. They don't have to get a life, because they get their rocks off watching yours deteriorate.