Quake

In what certainly sounds like a sex metaphor, I was in the middle of it, but I didn’t feel a thing. I was on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge when it hit – that’s where my calculations put me, at least – and had no idea.

Then I get this text message:

My boy at OEM says no elevators til 7 and if the lights flicker get the fuck out of the building.

But I wasn’t in a building, and there’s no radio in my car – only my iPod hookup – so I had nothing to listen to and no idea what this guy was talking about. I assumed there was some kind of terrorist alert, so while I sat on the bridge, not moving, I started Googling shit on my phone and figured it out. Then I put my phone away and turned the music back on. I suppose being trapped in a car on the George Washington Bridge while under the impression that a terrorist attack is an imminent possibility isn’t exactly ideal, but I wasn’t really given much choice in the matter.

Several hours and several trains later, after dropping off my car, I went home, got online, and went where I get all my news these days: Facebook.

On Facebook, all the people from New York were yelling about how they’d just experienced an earthquake, and all the people from California were yelling about how all the people yelling about the earthquake were pussies. I thought this was ridiculous, so I put up my own post on Facebook about it, then started texting people. Then I had something to eat.

I was working in New Jersey today. Most people don’t like New Jersey. I do. I know dozens of people from New Jersey, and they are all very nice. Nothing of note happened to me while I was there. I was neither enraged at anyone nor did I find anything particularly funny, so the only thing I can really do within the scope of this paragraph is point out the fact that I was in New Jersey. Perhaps that will clarify what I was doing on the George Washington Bridge. Or perhaps not, if you know nothing about this area.

The best news I can offer today, at least with regard to my life, is that I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of shit out of my system over the past month or so. As I wrote a few weeks ago, someone very close to me has cancer, and that hit me pretty hard. I was in a fucking awful frame of mind for a while. I wasn’t functioning well at work, I was eating like shit, and I was walking around the city like someone shot my dog.

The one good thing that happens when someone close to you gets sick, however, is that you get centered in a hurry. When someone has cancer, you only have one shot at it, so you put everything else to the side and you just go. Do that for enough days in a row, and you’re back to reality without even consciously trying – and reality, in my case, is a far cry from the career-killing woe-is-me bullshit I’ve been spewing for so long.

And all I can say about being supportive of someone with cancer is that I forgot how fucked up I look with my eyebrows shaved off. Can’t let her have all the fun, right?