6.5 in Eureka

Everything moved.

I ran outside.

“You're not supposed to run outside you idiot” My neighbor told me.

Screw that. I didn't want to be one of those people they dig out from under three floors with only an exercise ball jammed against a Bowflex to use as a breathing space.

My house has two floors so I guess only one floor can fall on me

I tried to move a bookcase the other day and had a hard timet. I'll bet the second floor of my house weighs more than the bookcase. I guess I wasn't crazy about something even a little bit heavier than the bookcase falling on me. So I ran outside.

Outside, parked cars were jumping like Mexican Jumping Beans. The telephone lines were moving as if they were long blacksnakes, slithering away along the poles. Everything was whipping around weirdly; the flowers, the shrubs. The redwood trees in the back yard were swooshing back a forth a little at the top but they didn't bother me because I was sure they'd been down this road a few times before. I'd be even less interested in having one of them fall on me than I would my second floor.

The whole thing only lasted a couple of minutes. It seemed longer. It was like car wreck stories you hear; everything sloooowing waaaay doooown. It seemed like sitting through an entire showing of Avatar. Surreal. High definition. Lots of things in the air or moving in directions they shouldn't. Everything very, very real with me watching saying, “Nah, can't happen.”

Later, when my neighbor told me I was an idiot for running outside I noticed while he was inside he had peed down the inside leg of his khakis and didn't even know. So I let him work on his advice column out in the yard while I went back inside to make out a check to send to Haiti.

If you haven't seen one you just can't imagine.