Thursday, June 9th

::The Brak Blog::

Cellar Door


Ok, so this update's going to be a little different. It's just about today, and I'm not trying to be funny, I just want to convery to you what a fucked up day I've been having.

Morning begins. I stumble down stairs and pour some coco-crunchies. Or whateverthefuck they're called. I eat the coco-crunchies. As I'm finishing them, I have this sudden pang, then a realization: This may not be the last time I see these coco-crunchies.

I have an orthodontist appointment today. They like to take "impressions", or models of your teeth, that determine how they've moved or changed since the last impression. I have a practice-renowned gag-reflex. To the point where that's how people at that office know me... "The Kid with the Gag-Reflex the Size of Rhode Island" (approx. 1,045 sq. mi.). In short, impressions = vomit-fest. Literally. I know that's a bit graphic, but it's the truth.

So I play pokemon (FireRed, recently purchased) for an hour or so, and then take a shower. When I get out I get dressed and sit and read for a while (Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) before it was time to go. Eventually though, I went. I sat in the office, playing Pokemon, bored, as a crowd for two moms, one 12 year old boy with a lisp, and two potentially attrative girls kept giving me weird looks.

Fuck them.
I was having a day.

In the end, no impressions were taken. My bite is out of alignment because my jaw is still growing, but my teeth are straight. And they have to do surgery to fix the bite thing. But they can't do that until I'm at least twenty-something. The bright side of all this is that I don't have to go back for orthodontics for another two years. Party.

After that was over I went to Miege to pick up Molly so Erin and her could have a little play-date-whatever. I didn't really mind, seeing as how I got free Taco Bell out of the whole deal. I came home and watched an episode of home movies. The DVD had a bonus thing that taught you how to play the theme! I tried it out, and it [doesn't totally suck]. I had to go to work at two though, so that ended really quick.

I get to work, and as usually there's a ton of shit to do. I hate wednesdays. That means shirt day. Which means that shirts are 50 cents cheaper than they are on a typical day. (That's where fiddy-scent got his name. True story.) My new boss briefs me on the day's fiascos, and Katie eventually shows up to do a little work to help lighten the load. By 4 o'clock I'm by myself again.

I'm listening to the radio and plugging away at the mountain of work that everyone left for me, and that no matter how much I do somehow keeps perpetuating itself with new orders. Suddenly though, the day gets worse. I hear this screeching tonal sound emit from the radio. I knew this sound all to well. A long time ago I used to watch this show Family Matters when I got home from school. This was in 1st and 2nd grade I believe. It was at this exact time in the afternoon that they tested the emergency broadcast signal. Scared the living daylights out of me. So in any case, the automated voice tells me that Pleasant Hill has issued a tornado warning/watch/sighting thing in Leavenworth county.

I knew Leavenworth is quite a bit west of where I work, but this still scared me. As the night wore on, more emergency things came on, and the storm was getting closer. I wasn't that worried though, because the storm was only moving at about ten miles an hour to the north east, which I figured, even though I had to go further west to pick up my suit, I should be able to outrun in a car. As I gathered the trash up, and threw open the door to take it outside, a gust of air hit me that was so warm and humid I was almost suprised. Around the back of the building where the dumpster is, I looked up, directly west.

I was faced with a walll of black, bleeding over into the sky which was a navy blue color from the last dying rays of the sun. The wall lit up dimly, as lightning struck in the distance. I closed up the store and timed out, but not before tallying that I'd processed 100 shirts and 43 pieces of dry cleaning for a grand total of 143 items. Crapping day... (I'll make almost 100 dollars for work this week alone)

Outside I got into the car at about 8:30 and noticed I had no scary storm music. Duran Duran would have to do then. The Reflex bantered on as I merged onto I-435 to go west, then north. The wall I previously refered to was dead ahead and growling larger. No longer dimly lit by the far off lightning, the sky continuously scintilated between night and day as is crashed all around. I turned the Duran Duran up louder. I finally made it to the Quivera exit, and started heading north. It starts to sprinkle.

At the Men's Warehouse I pick up my new suit around 8:50. As I step outside, I feel that blast of warm air again, except this one is followed by a spray of rain. After a quick blitz to the car, I'm out of the wet again, but it's raining pretty good. At this point, I can see the storm closing in from the north, south, and west. Only a hint of that navy color of clear skies remains above the eastbound 435. "That's the needle I'm trying to thread here," I thought. Duran Duran gets turned up louder.

On the overpass to get back on the highway the lightning is going crazy. I look down Quivera and see a huge explosion of light and sound. As this happens, I notice the rain. Typically rain falls and makes a splat and a little wet circle on the windshield. The rain I was seeing was making little horizontal streaks parallel to the skyline across the front of my car. Horizontal rain. Green arrow. Time to get moving.

When I say the highway experiance was one of the most terrifying of my life, I'm not really exagerating. I don't think I've ever been closer to dying. You're in the car, driving through about an inch of water, as the car is periodically assaulted by a near wave of sheet after sheet of the horizontal rain. The car responds slugishly, and staying in a lane is damn near impossible. The only thing you can do if follow the two little tail lights in front of you. It's kind of ironic how those little red demon-eyes are the only thing keeping you from flying off the road, you know?

I stuck with one guy practically the entire drive, and as I was about to get off on state line this little voice inside me told me to keeping going. Driving on those roads was just asking to get killed, but the excitement of it provided a kind of adreneline rush. I decided if my friend got off, I would, but if not, I'd stay. We stayed. It wasn't much further to the Warnall exit, but I realized as I pulled off and got into a turn lane, that I'd been holding my breath since State Line. I looked around to get my bearings, and realized my windshield wipers weren't wiping anything.

This was kinda weird, because I knew it was still raining. I turned them off. Nothing got them wet. Then suddenly, streams of water came rolling from the top of the car down the windshield. I realized that the wind was blowing so hard that the rain couldn't fall vertically, and it was all blowing straight over me, or pelting the rear window. How odd. Another green arrow. Time to move again.

Warnall wasn't much better than the highway. I'd failed to threat the needle and was caught up in the core of the storm system. People went a lot faster on the residential roads than I thought though, so I didn't have any taillights to follow. It was scary. Especially where the road gets all curvy. At 85th street, I decided not to push my luck, and turned off and stopped at my grandma's house at about 9:20. Partly to see if she was ok, but mostly becuase I was starting to freak out.

It was very noirish, the warm steam raising off the car wafted across her driveway as I shut off the engine. I went up to her dark porch and as I knocked, all of her streetlights went dead. She answered the door and let me. We then watched Katie Horner for about 20 minutes as I waited for the whole thing to blow over. Turns out that thing I saw back on Quivera was a microburst. It also turns out I was driving through 70-80 mile per hour winds. I decided that I needed to get home though, and so I got back into the car and drove.

This ride was creepy becuase there weren't many people out, and it was only 9:45. There were also parts of trees everywhere. Lanes of Ward Parkway were blocked, and there was standing water everywhere. I was coming down the home stretch when I suddenly skidded to a stop. Through the rain and wind, my headlights revealed the glowing image of a tree, lying across Edgevale. A tree that must have been over a foot in diameter. I backed up, and went home another way.

Upon ariving home, I told a condensed version of this story to my dad, said hello to Kathryn Murphy, who was at my house visiting Erin, and got online. I started typing this and talked to some people about how insane the storm was. Then they unexpectantly left. I couldn't decide if they got bored of me or their power just ment out. Suddenly I was alone again. It was like being back in that dry cleaners with no basement and the emergency thing telling me to go lie in a ditch. I hate that feeling more than anything in the world.

So I didn't really feel up to finishing this. I went to bed at 12 and was promptly awakened at 12:30 by my father bitching at me to turn off the computer. Whatever. At 12:35 he came in to turn it off himself. Not wanting to lose what little of this I'd already written, I got up and did it myself. Seven hours later he woke me up again and started yelling that I had to drive out to the car place with my mom so she could leave her car there and come home.

Fine. She gets in the car after dropping the van off to get it's AC fixed, and the first thing she starts the conversation with is how dirty my car is. You're welcome for the ride. Geez. But its lunchtime now, and I feel a bit better. Not so much alone, but just tired and spent. Nationals better be good.

Cowboys are usually alone.
They just don't always like it.

As was prophesized by Tom at 01:32 PM CST
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