Tornado

This week I spent a few days at my dad's. Major events include visiting the new healthy protein shop. I had a Captain Crunch 180 calorie, 4 grams of sugar shake, and I can't stop dreaming about it. Walks through main street, past the new blinking movie sign and into the teensers coffee house. I feel at ease out of the city. I get the high score at the pizza parlor Ms. Pac-Man. I watch King of Queens while grading papers and journal in the room above the stairs, train horn blowing by.

Puhg came, and we ended up at dinner on a very gloomy night. We ordered a big pretzel and salads while the sky went black. Soon everyone in the restaurant's phone started going off. Warnings, warnings. I, usually calm about these things, felt nervous to be next to the window. It was headed for our town. The trees whipped around. The manager led us all to the basement, where some guy brought his beer and an angry woman complained. There was no cell service and soon the power went out. The street held tubs of water. I said I felt safe, and someone near me said maybe the ceiling would collapse. I doubted it. But I imagined my computer--probably not backed up since my last play revision--being lifted from the living room of my dad's house. I am first a writer.

In a half hour the lights weren't on, but we were welcome to go back upstairs. Our food had finished. I ate the warmed, icky salad. Everything was on the house. Puhg got two craft beers while my dad looked furiously for info online, prepping for the onslaught of work at the paper. Small towns ain't bad. It had been the plan to see Get Out, but the theatre had no projectors running, so we watched Arrival in the living room. Things change but they're still good. The tornado destroyed a nursing home. Only one person and a lot of property dead. The governor came out the next morning. I had the most peaceful night's sleep I can remember. The window was open, and everything smelled like rain.

Sunny Side Up

Part One

As soon as I saw it, I felt like the entire building was filled with gray clay. Thick, sad bubbles of muck. Two nights ago, somebody egged the beautiful and valuable painting that hangs in the campus concourse.

It made me sadder than if the eggs had been thrown at my own car, home, face. I understand aimed hatred. I don't like it, but I understand it. In fact, in a week in which our entire country felt it necessary to celebrate a murder, I don't blame someone for letting his rage get the best of him...but this? This was just senseless. Really senseless. All that happens: the Student Activities Fund is drained, everyone is sad, no one gets it.

To everyone passing the cherry picker of women scrubbing the yolk off, all we could ask was WHY? WHY? WHY? But, the truth is the answer could be, "Uh...I dunno."

Senselessness is big. It's poofs out sideways and slops over its waistline. We must live with complete alertness because these things MATTER. Yes, I'm a broken record, but choosing NOT to order the Meat Luvers Deluxe pizza is SENSE. Putting your gum in the trash is SENSE. Choosing to refrain from the mean gossip is SENSE.

It's little to us, but it explodes in pig guts, on someone's shoe, in someone's diary as she cries. Having a couple extra eggs and absentmindedly playing darts with a painted angel's wings is SENSELESS.

Part Two

I never look at the painting. But a FIRE within me sprang up yesterday. I noticed it. I pondered the rightness and wrongness of life, of crime and punishment, because of it. Probably given the option, the artist would have preferred her work be defaced in the name of rallying around Right instead of hanging stiffly for decades.

Like the tornado that wiped out the community theatre in one town over from my dad's--it reenergized the town into believing We Fight for Arts Here. And I was there last Saturday when on a new stage, the community players say "Let the Sunshine In."


The egged painting getting touched up today.

They caught the kid who did the egging. Don't know anything else.

Two castmates have just started dating. It's secret, I think. It's sly. I don't know when it happened. I want to think it was when he and I were talking when she walked by. I said, "She's so great at that part." And he said, "Yeah." He beamed like lilac soap and sunny side up in the pan.

Who died? Who made you king of anything?