Southern Shakedown

A  few months ago I felt what I thought was a super heavy truck rumbling by.  It was a slow mover, too.  Took all of half a minute worth of shaking the foundation before it passed.  Then I found out it was an earthquake.  Cool!  Well, I don’t mean cool as in yippee, but cool as in I live in Florence, Alabama, for screaming out loud.  There’s not supposed to be earthquakes here.  I live in tornado alley on the first floor and am used to dodging those critters, but haven’t been trained in evading earthquakes.  I’m even used to the remnants of hurricanes drenching the Tennessee Valley (funny that the powers that be call it the Tennessee Valley even though it’s in Alabama – must be an old property rights thing) in the summertime.  I have no idea what to do for an earthquake, though.  Guess I’m going to have to get a seatbelt for my computer chair.  Knowing my luck it’ll get stuck and I’ll have to spend the rest of my life rolling around looking for bubble wrap to pop.

If earthquakes are going to become the norm here, I think I’ll move to California where it’s really safe.  I’m serious.  They have buildings made of Slinkies and highways made of Jell-O just so they don’t have to worry about cleaning up rubble all the time.  I saw a video once of a street wobbling up and down like it was a roller coaster and the telephone poles beside it looked like chop sticks in soup.  What in the heck are you suppose to do when that happens?  Stay inside your house and you’ll probably end up a sheetrock sandwich.  Go outside and get beaned by flying debris or plucked by huge chop sticks.  If I wanted that kind of action I’d go to Six Flags.

It’s pretty rough when an earthquake picks on coastal cities.  Look what it did to Japan.  Now when you buy a radio or sushi you’ll be able to see it in the dark because of the radiation.  That’s not all that happens to folks near the water.  When an earthquake rumbles off shore it’s like a fat man doing a belly flop in a bathtub.  They call it a tsunami.  I call it one hell of a big wave.  Do you believe professional surfers actually go around the world looking for stuff like that?  What I want to know is who pays them to ride the waves?  Do they get a free pass to an all-you-can-eat shark buffet?  I know there are some sharks that would love to be at an all-you-can-eat people buffet.  Now that I think about it, I don’t want to live in California.  I can barely swim as it is.  Maybe I could get some land in Nevada, and when the Big One hits I’ll have ocean front property.  Wait.  Then I’ll still be on the coast.  Maybe I can get a couple of acres on top of one of the Rocky Mountains.

We all know there’s going to be the Big One someday, and by that I mean a huge earthquake that will turn California into the next Atlantis.  At least that’s what they keep telling us.  Who in their right mind would want to live in a place that’s going to eventually slide into the ocean?  Never mind.  I answered my own question.  I thought the Big One was going to happen when Hollywood made a Scooby-Doo movie, but I was wrong.  The fault line runs from Mexico all the way up to British Columbia.  Let me tell you there’s not enough Superglue on the planet to fix that crack.  I think the words ‘fault line’ are appropriate, since something has to take responsibility for it.  There’s a big earthquake.  Someone crawls out of the remnants of their home and says “Who did this?”  I can honestly point to the fissure in the ground and respond, “It’s the line’s fault!”

But back to my original dilemma.  Earthquakes aren’t supposed to happen in the Deep South.  Because we’re deep in the South, far away from mischievous lines in the earth.  Just a couple weeks before our rumble there was a fairly big earthquake centered in Virginia.  Probably from someone having eaten too much BBQ pork and pickled eggs.  Nevertheless, it happened, and people could feel it all the way from Atlanta to Toronto to Detroit to Boston.  We do not need Mother Earth to develop a case of Tourettes.  Ok, cursing is fine, but these global twitches have got to go.  We’re running out of places to, well, run.  Kansas is looking better and better all the time.