My first kitchen dance

As I've said before, this blog was initially going to be a chronicle of my journey from Chicago to LA, and then a journal of life in Southern California. I'll get to that one of these days. Today, however, is a good day to get "back on message" as the pundits would say. Why is that, you axe? Because today I experienced (read: felt) my first California earthquake.

I was checking my email before going in to work this afternoon when my kitchen started dancing. I could feel the kitchen breakfast bar thingy going up and down rapidly. I looked at its reflection in the big sliding glass door leading out to my balcony and actually saw the kitchen going up and down in the reflection.

Now, ever since I first experienced southern California at around age 9, I've always felt I belonged here. I think, in fact, that I've always been a Californian. I grew up on a skateboard. I LOVE the sun. Palm trees, tropical drinks, bikinis, the beach, surfing, bikinis, fresh produce, the movie business, bikinis, the ocean waves, bikinis. You get the idea. Everthing that Chicago is not from November through March.

I proved to myself today that I am really a Californian by my reaction to the quake. After the first couple seconds, I actually said out loud "Goddamnit, what the hell are they DOING up there??" while fixing my apartment ceiling with a withering stare. I'd assumed my upstairs neighbors were doing something so loud and violent that it was shaking my entire kitchen up and down. I mean, they've been loud before, but what was I thinking? Then it slowly dawned on me. Was that a....oh man I hope it was!! Maybe there'll be AFTERSHOCKS!!!!! I waited, but none came.

A lot of people think it's crazy to move to southern CA. They liken it to deciding to live in a demilitarized zone somewhere in the middle east, with Mother Nature trying her damndest to kill you every day instead of terrorists. There are fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, bobcats, cougars, rattlesnakes, crypts, bloods, the L.A.P.D. (if you're black), riots (if you're white), serial killers (although the midwest has way more of those), landslides, floods, droughts, famine, pestilence, rivers of blood, etc. But to those people I say this: yes, there is the occasional event that warrants that a few counties be declared disaster areas for a week or two. But hell, Illinois is no better. I was in the epicenter of an earthquake in Lawrenceville, IL (or near enough to it that the ground moved up and down fast enough to make my knees buckle). The flooding of the Mississippi that Adam Pyne and I saw was downright scary (it was encroaching on the St. Louis arch itself - whole trees were washing down the river at breakneck speeds). And Illinois, among other states in the midwest, is home to the Brown Recluse spider. Those are fun. But aside from all that, the temperature drops to below freezing for months at a time! At least here we have year round bikinis.

Besides, I think Mother Nature is actually trying to rid the earth of stupid people. She first lures them to southern California (with the promise of stardom for most), then attempts to destroy them. For example, there was a tsunami warning the other day in San Francisco that was supposed to cause tidal waves down here, and this caused crowds of people in Long Beach to run to the ocean to "see it." I guess they weren't watching tv during the two month, round-the-clock coverage of the one in Indonesia. Some of them probably wanted to surf it, I'm sure.

Luckily, I'm not in that group of people. I never do anything stupid. Like wait in joyful hope for an aftershock.