Hurricane in Cali, Folks.
I’m not numb to the news. My brain just seems to know how to prioritize it based on the clickbait headline or the legitimate one.
Reporting on extreme weather is its own genre. The buildup to what was supposed to be a major, rare tropical storm that was going to hit Southern California was pretty dramatic. I take most weather hysteria with a grain of salt. Even in these end times of apocalyptic heat and storm the old wisdom that forecasting is still speculation usually holds. Even with all the tracking technology, you never really know how it’s going to go. I thought I was far enough inland not to have to deal with the intensity of wind and rain the coast was going to get. Turns out, by the time it got to LA it had shifted its path and intensity to being just a medium barrage of rain.
I kind of knew it would.
I did think, as I do all the time, about the panic things? Why haven't I gotten a generator? How does a generator power a house? Why haven’t I replaced or cleaned my rain gutters? What if it blows my roof off? What if I have to tarp my roof? Is my ladder even big enough? What if I fall off the roof? What if it brings one of the old trees down on my house? What if the power goes out for days? What about food? What if society breaks down and looters run amok in the streets? What about water?
Well, I have water. For some reason, Liquid Death has sent me about 50 cases of water over the last half year. I think we did one ad with them. It keeps coming though. So, no matter what happens I’ll be good with water. Sparking and flat.
Unless that’s what they come looking for. The hordes.
The storm was fine. Easy. Manageable. The power did go out for a few hours for reasons I can’t even understand. It almost felt like so much press went into setting us up for a disaster that the power company felt like it was the least they could do to make us feel like we weren’t duped into overreacting. Like, ‘Let’s just turn it off for a bit so they won’t be numb to the reality that horrendous weather is upon us. Let’s give them a taste.’
I’m already a little numb. Maybe not numb, but neutered. I feel powerless over the weather, disease, coming fascism, my past, politics. I think I’m pretty well informed. I know what’s up. I can’t rationalize it anymore. I’m terrified but I can’t live in that. All I can do is entertain the reality. That’s actually what I do for a living. On the metaphorical level that’s what we do in our brains. We know the reality but we don’t really take any action because it feels futile so we entertain it as our mental disposition.
One character we play for ourselves is the well-informed clown that believes we do all we can by living the life we live. The other clown is the uninformed one that does everything to ignore what is going on in the name of living the life they think they should live. Another clown is just screaming and crying and hopeless all the time. That’s usually the funniest one. There are subsets to these hellish circus people but that’s another paper, maybe a book.
Anyway, keep your clown healthy and focused and maybe try a different nose occasionally.
Today I talk to Amanda Seales, who I think might be my twin somehow, about her special and her new doc In Amanda we Trust and life, a lot of life. On Thursday I talk to Andrew Leland about going blind and his book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. Great talks!
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
The Well-Informed Clown.
