Hurricanes, for those who know, are not predictable beasts. They usually don’t hit as fast as tornadoes or earthquakes or even wild fires. You sit around waiting and preparing (or not) and watching, unsure of what is really going to happen until the very last minute when it shifts five degrees north and either spares you or rips your world apart.
Right now, the whole city of Tallahassee feels this way, especially if you are even tangentially associated with universities, due to #Covid19. Some steps have been taken such as shutting down f2f classes until April, but that leaves a cascading series of things that will need to be dealt with and no one — no one — knows how that is going to hit. Because of fucking course not a single higher ed institution in this country ever expected to shut down for a pandemic. *rolls eyes*
Like the preface to a hurricane, there is a lot of panic and baited breath and speculation and runs on toilet paper (this toilet paper thing is symbolic of something, I have no idea what tho’).
Anyway, I counted the LED lamp lights interspersed around Lake Ella this morning.
I thought about counting them as we prepare for this pandemic to hit our fair city because what do we really know about our lives? How many times do you touch your face? How many of your friends don’t know how to wash their hands? How many germs are on a bus seat? How often do you grab the stair rails, the door handles, the arm rests of a commonly used chair? How many chairs are in your office lobby? How often are they used?
We zoom through life thoughtlessly, which is not a condemnation but rather an observation of what humanity is really like. We take our existence for granted, and that includes everything around us.
There are five. Five bright white lights casting sharp shadows on the ground.