By the intensity with which something is being said

by Luke O’Neil

One of the bad storms was on the TV. It was one of the ones that was bad enough that I gather the guys down at the TV store thought they could make good money off of it by showing it on a loop all night with the apartment buildings genuflecting into the surf and the wind shaving the trees bald and the rest of it and so I sat there watching for hours on a Tuesday only partly on account of that football was dormant. Meanwhile my eyes were darting toward the window every time a branch outside of my own questionably built home groaned in the local and altogether unrelated wind.

Unless all wind is related then never mind.

It was stupid of me to become subjectively uneasy I surmised because the famous TV storm was a thousand miles away and storms aren’t that big just yet that they can touch all of us at the same time. I knew it was stupid to worry about it but I kept doing it like everything else I knew was stupid and kept doing.

Still the sound of my trees bowing outside was like when you’ve woken from a nightmare and the whining floorboards are transposed into an intruder’s footsteps.

Of late I’ve been having the one again where I’m a waiter in the weeds getting sat with five tables at once then ten then fifteen one after the next and I am trying so hard but I simply cannot manage to greet each of them and the layout of the Escheresque restaurant mutates into foolishness. I can’t even water them to buy time and what’s worse it’s my first day but also I'm returning after a long absence and I don’t know the menu yet or anymore and then I burst out of that and gasp and now there’s a psychopath smiling at the foot of the bed like they can see the future in short increments and then I burst out of that and it’s just all of all of this.

Not entirely sure which scenario I’d prefer at this point in my life the tables or the killer or reality.

On the TV the asphalt shingled roof of a treacly cocktail blue home was being cracked in half like a chest cavity by a billion year old heart surgeon.

I thought of sitting at the foot of my grandfather’s ottoman on a vulgar musty carpet as he watched the kind of storms we used to have on the kind of TVs we used to have and how the kind of reporters we used to have presented it all in a jargon I didn’t speak and still don’t in terms of wave surges and specific categories of wind power but much like when you’re unequipped to translate a foreign language you can nonetheless glean the necessary information by the intensity with which something is being said. The same way as when you’re a kid and stupid you basically get what all is transpiring with the adults in the room on the other side of your wall when the yelling is going on. Or maybe when you’re traveling and someone is furious or laughing or scared out of their mind and it breaks through your denseness no matter what language they’re suffering inside the bracketing of.