I can’t sleep, so I blog.
It’s been raining buckets for days here, like biblical proportions. The other night when I was lying in bed going to sleep the rain was absolutely hammering the house, which I always enjoy, but I could swear I heard some other faint sound underneath all the relentless rain on the roof and window. I thought I heard a very dull “thump” every several seconds but it was so faint that I wasn’t convinced I actually heard it. At one point when I turned from one side onto my back, I couldn’t hear it anymore, plus our rubber garbage cans with their rubber lids are just outside our bedroom window and when it’s raining hard sometimes the drips on those lids sounds like the sound I thought I was possibly hearing, so I put it out of my mind, went to sleep, and then went to work yesterday.
At work, I bumped into someone who mentioned their basement was flooded. We have a crawlspace here at home so I thought, “huh, in the 13 years I’ve been in this house we’ve never had a problem with water down there but I should look anyway just to be diligent.” I got home and when I had a minute, I took a look and saw that the dull thumping sound I heard the night before was our numerous tupperware bins in the basement, floating around and bumping into each other. One section of the crawlspace was absolute chaos, with everything knocked off and all over the place, and the concrete floor was still damp. Luckily, there is a drain down there and it did its job and all the water was gone now, and it looks like there was only ever maybe 8-10″ of water and that was only at the deepest point by the drain. And it’s just concrete down there so no wood or drywall or insulation damage, and most of our shit was in tupperware bins so it’s mostly fine. There will just be a few boxes of Halloween costume shit and stuff like that to dry out or toss.
So really, we’re incredibly lucky. Last night Jenn and I were looking at pics of the flooding throughout the rest of the province — highways washed out, mobile homes being washed away, entire neighbourhoods with water up to the windows of their homes, communities cut off from the rest of the world due to mudslides or road damage — and I thought if all we have to do is spend a few hours cleaning up some shit we haven’t even looked at in years, we’ve got a lot to be grateful for. At least our home and neighbourhood isn’t completely destroyed, and we aren’t cut off from the rest of the world. There are many people who are going to be feeling the effects of this crazy weather for a long time to come so I really can’t complain. I always feel really lucky in these moments.
On the other hand, Jenn thinks the apocalypse is nigh. She pointed out the pandemic that has had far-reaching effects no one could have predicted, the heat dome this last summer that killed a shocking number of people, and now the worst flooding we’ve ever seen. I agree it’s been an exciting time lately but I want nuclear war and/or Mad Max-style chaos before I’m willing to call it an apocalypse. And I’d like that kind of shit to all go down at once too — this slow rollout of several unprecedented (lol) events over the course of 1-2 years isn’t cohesive enough for me to grant it such an auspicious title. I want it all happening either back to back or simultaneously, and all our support measures to completely collapse. THEN I’ll clap my hands and laugh shrilly, and call it an apocalypse.
I took some melatonin and valerian root extract when I started writing this, in the hope I’d feel tired enough to sleep by now. I don’t think I do feel that, but maybe? It’s worth a try though. Over and out.
crimson highway 