Fight the Fight

I was woken up a little early today. Descending from the fog, something was off… My wife whispered something.

My mind was still waking up and trying to decode the weirdness at the same time. “Huh?”

She whispered it again. I’m still not catching it. Why is she whispering anyway? I hear the noises all around us, but I’m not putting things together. I repeat my last one syllable question.

“The house is shaking.” I knew it before she said it, but we were both still quite in the fog. And like that it was over.

I was hoping both of us would go back to sleep, but a few moments later she finally declared that it was an earthquake.

It was 5:37 (5:41 according to the oversized and intentionally 3 minutes fast clock) and it has been given a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 and lasted for only about 5 seconds. I stared at the shadows for a few minutes of waiting for an aftershock, sirens, or the neighbor’s dog barking. Nothing came, we went back to sleep.

Upon waking up and turning on the news, ALL local media was completely and utterly in love with the fact that there was this “natural disaster” for them to sensationalize. All the anchors, remote teams, weathermen, and the traffic people were more than happy to share their stories of where they were when it went down. They were preempting the national news broadcasts for this.

Isn’t it interesting that truckers at a truck stop in their cabs with the engine idling didn’t feel the quake? Or that there’s no damage reported 2-hours later except to one building in Louisville… The traffic guy was working on graphics and wondering why his desk was shaking… The weather man just wondered why there was a sudden influx of emails and calls to the station… One of the anchor’s husband and kids didn’t even know anything happened! Riveting…

I couldn’t make this up if I tried… Oh wait. I could – because it’s too boring to be called news.

Maybe that’s why they call us Naptown… I know that all news is sensationalized, but local news seems to be so bad anymore. I’ll go further – local news is a joke. But Helio Castroneves is joining the team during the month of May!