Strange Weather

By 12:40pm on November 22, 2024, I had posted the digital social life equivalent of out-of-office messages on my various social media accounts and several conceptually adjacent venues. At 12:44pm, my mobile phone erupted in a shrill, bristling alarm: the message announced was a flash flood warning for our area. Not to tempt fate, but given that I live near the top of a very tall hill, I had a sense that we were safe (tl;dr: we were), but the irony of the short time that passed between “I will stop, for a month or so, publicly tracking on social media the role of sound in my life” and “The city is using sound to get my attention for reasons of life, limb, and potential property damage” was not lost on me.

The next morning I curled up on on the couch and watched a bunch of movies, among them a recent disaster flick, Twisters. At some point late in the film, a feckless couple refuses to believe that a massive example of the title subject is headed their way. One of them gestures near an ear, so as to say, “See, there’s no tornado siren, ergo there is no tornado.” What the person doesn’t know, and we — the audience — do, is that the sirens were, just minutes earlier, themselves wiped off the face of the planet by the rapidly growing storm. The couple and their car soon meet the same fate.