Help me Wilma

The night after the storm hit I felt like time had stopped. The night was as still as I had felt it in my short time here, and the air was cold and inviting to my lungs. A feeling that think I had almost forgotten… I really felt at home in such a weird way. I was dirty, with no hope of a shower, had no idea what was happening in the world, no way of communicating… I felt myself imagining I was in the middle of my Uncle Chuck’s farm pasture on a brisk fall evening. You know the kind… The first evening after the temperature breaks and you have the conscience thought, “it’s going to get cold”. Standing there in the middle of nowhere, completely alone, maybe a little scared, but knowing that nothing will harm you, waving your hand in front of your face just to make sure that your eyes are still working properly.

I am in the middle of one of America’s most populated areas and I can see no light, I can hear no cars and it is as peaceful as any place that I have ever been… I already feel the memories of that day slipping away, and It happened less than two weeks ago. It’s like when you join BMG music club and you get the 12 free CD’s and realize that you can only listen to one at a time, so you listen to only the “good” songs, or you listen to only 2 of the CD’s. It turns out that you never REALLY listen to any of them before you loose interest and the whole thing is a waste… I have had so much shit happen in the last month, that I feel like I am being forced to listen to all of the CD’s simultaneously… I just want to retain and enjoy all of the positive things that have happened, and learn from the bad things… Damn-it Joe, don’t let this be wasted I keep saying to myself.

As I stood there, peeing on my landlords back shed looking up at the clear sky, and the largest amount of stars I had seen since the last time I had stepped foot in Kansas, I started thinking about all of the times that I had wished upon a star… I liked this girl in high school that used to wish upon a star every night and she got my into the habit (we do it together sometimes now)… Anyway, I have probably done this well over 600-1000 times in my life and I think that it had enhanced my quality of life in many ways… If nothing else, you can get in touch with your childhood once a day (which is an extremely important thing).

Then I started to think about a bunch of weird stuff. Our Sun is a middle sized star. It can hold a million Earths inside it… There are over a quadzillion (infinite) stars in the universe. If you started to walk on the day that you were born and walked the average human speed, you would not reach the moon before you died. HOLY SHIT my mind is going to explode…

So I finished making some rust on Randy’s (landlord) shed and stood there in the pitch black of a decimated South Florida for roughly 5 minutes. I just stood there and felt a small grin develop across my face… “I can pee standing up” I thought… Oh… I forgot to tell you that it is customary to get piss drunk the night after a Hurricane. So your mind sort of staggers a bit from topic to topic…

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Blowing winds, downed trees and a cameo by myself… Check out the Hurricane Wilma movie that I put together.