PTSD?

 

 

 The Haiti earthquake is causing me to feel real distress.  Nothing at all what people there are experiencing – I cannot compare my life to theirs right now – but I remember living through the Kobe quake in 1995 and the weeks afterwards when life was stripped to it’s absolute essentials – go get water and find food, find cigarettes (and some would say they ain’t essential) and bourbon, avoid anything that can fall on you.  Be prepared to run for your life all the time.

The Kobe quake devastated the sixth largest city in Japan and killed 6,000 people.

Haiti’s Capitol city is destroyed and at least 200,00 people are thought to have died.

If I HAD to have the eathquake experience, I’m "glad" I had it in a First-World country.

Still, it’s making me fearful.  Ok, the number one largest fault in the whole area runs by a quarter mile away, and I live in an eight floor apartment building – it will not be the same as being closer to the ground, and the quake that messed up Tacoma a few years ago made this building wiggle alarmingly – but I do live on the eighth floor, and from what I saw in Kobe, if ya gotta be in a high rise, be on the top floor.  The building will likely pancake down, and the first floors are fucked.

I’ve got a Maglight clipped to my bedframe and change the batteries regularly, just in case.

There’s nothing near my bed that can fall on me.

 

*****