I Wonder If This Cave Is Not Entirely Stable

Waking up this morning I walked into the kitchen and could not help stopping for a minute to look around at all the mess. How do I manage to live like this? There are clothes both dirty and clean strewn everywhere, not to mention the food products, dirty cups, dirty socks, plastic bags, toys, games, bowls and plates, papers, overturned picture frames, fallen down houseplants, a broken dish…it looks like there’s been an earthquake here, and if my place didn’t usually look like this then it would be easier to tell that, in fact, there was. An earthquake. Here, this morning, an earthquake.

Now, the locals seem more or less unfazed by this, and yes, it wasn’t a real big deal of a quake. Certainly no catastrophe like the awful news from Indonesia. How many dead? Boy, if there is a God then he is spending these days being angry with the world…tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, and now all the frogs are dying. How’s that for a sign? All the frogs are dying. If I were a spiritual man, I’d be reading the writing on that wall alright: “God said a fire not a flood next time,” neh?

But today’s earthquake, or jishin in the Japanese (which turns out to be a homonym for confidence, as I found out under bizarre circumstances recently), was nothing on the biblical spectacle scale, really more of just a small tremor. Still, it was a scary small tremor. I woke up at 5:15 in the morning with the sensation of being about to throw up, but the feeling wasn’t coming from my belly. It was coming from my floor, and my walls. And Everything around me. It is a most surprising thing to wake up and discover everything stable in the world you know to be moving wildly out of your control. Perhaps it’s always true, perhaps chaos is our true but hidden status quo, but usually you can discern for yourself some small measure of control, at the very least in the stillness of your own body: the world may always be spinning, but you can still sit in one place.

This is untrue during an earthquake. There is nothing stable. I will admit that I did not a one of the earthquake safety tips I’ve learned through the years from sources like school assemblies and the Animaniacs; I did not go to a doorframe, I did not crawl to a “triangle of life” next to a bulky piece of furniture (though this one has debatable merit anyway), rather, I stayed glued to my futon hoping that it would pass quickly and not get worse and thinking thoughts along the lines of “holy crap!!! AhhhhhhhhHolycrap!” It stopped after a few minutes, and quickly making up my mind that I could do nothing either preventative or preemptive should it return before work-time, I went back to sleep till 7. When I woke up again, I might not have even remembered it but for a few extra things on top of the pile of mess that had in last memory been safely on top of cabinets. “Now why is that on the floor?”