August 16, 2007

• Wake up, wake up! 

  As terribly sorry as I am for disturbing your sleep at such an ignominious hour, I cannot help but also feel that it is entirely and completely justified.  Let me explain.

  Not but ten minutes ago the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring moment of my life occurred. 

  At about 3:30 A.M. I had finished reading what I wanted to of Sherlock Holmes (up to chapter five in the The Sign of Four) and was about to call it a night.  Suddenly, however, the light downpour that I had heard the sussuration of while reading had developed into a vivacious thunderstorm of extraordinarily close proximity.  I went to the front door and was only going to watch for a few moments, but that was before I realized the awesome nature of what was truly happening right on top of my local Ohio suburb.

  Lightning was striking no less than every three seconds.  Arbitrarily, and in every direction, it was coming down as though it were atmospheric wac-a-mole with lightning bolts.  I marveled at it delightfully for a few minutes from my front doorstep before I ingeniously realized that such an event should not go unrecorded.  After a slightly extensive search for the camcorder and a usable tape, I set about recording the lightning that was occurring across from my house.   It was a slow process, due mainly to the fact that I believe my camera has A.D.D., as is indicated by its lack of ability to stay focused for more than thirty seconds at a time, but in the end proved highly profitable. 

  I caught some dandies, but nothing particularly special.  Soon I decided I would have to venture out into the storm if I was going to document anything truly terrific.  Using a towel to keep the equipment dry, I travelled down my street and got some better angles of the area around my neighborhood where the storm was taking place.  It was not a heavy downpour, so I was in great situational luck.

  After a bit I had run out of tape, so I stashed the camera inside the house and then came back out to enjoy the storm.  It was about 4:30 A.M., and my neighbors were obviously all still sleeping judging by the sullen and swarthy facades of their houses.  Naturally in such a singular and ideal set of circumstances, I enjoyed myself by dancing and singing all over my street’s sidewalk and roadway.  The storm had mostly died down to the occasional lightning bolt every minute or so, which were sometimes not even visible for being somewhere far off beyond the horizon. 

  But then, without so much as the slightest sign of imminence, and from seemingly absolutely nowhere, the heavens opened up, and the fury of Zeus was unleashed.  From directly above me in the sky a single bolt flashed strong and wide, and from it I saw others unravel from it in seemingly every single direction, as though it were building an electric cage around me.  A moment, a sheer milisecond before, I had been standing in the dim and fading light of a street lamp, but I was now a lowly worm, shriveling helplessly inside an ineffably brilliant and heavenly coruscating set of branches of all-encompassing lightning.   It broke the sky like a sculptor; and in power and majesty, for only but a brief second of the earth’s long and tumultuous existence, and in only the limited region of my urban sprawl, it ruled the heavens.    

  As testimony to its nature close at hand, not even before the tremendous flash had concluding did a roaring boom–no, explosion–blast along with it, sending its potent message right into me as though I was the ear of the earth.  Its crack! was so loud that it seemed as though a heavenly megaphone was sending the sound waves straight at me specifically.  Together with the panorama of lightning, the thunder produced an indescribable shock and frisson within my body like I have never known before.  In that moment, I felt the door of my existence lose a few of its hinges as it was shook silly like a small child by an adult.

  At the picosecond of its arrival my consumed senses sent my body out of its listless stroll and straight up into the air like a cartoon.  When I landed, I completed watching its beauty and prodigiousness unfold, overwhelming my comparatively trivial being to its core.  Along with jumping, I began making a noise — not a distinguishable one — that was a combination of and changed between shrieking, cackling hysterically, wailing, gargling, and uttering gobbledegook.  I broke for the house — fifty meters away — in a mad dash on my tip-toes (I was barefooted) like a hysterical madman.  As a bumbling hobbledehoy I entered the house, and when I did so, I could not contain myself and was breathing heavy and hard, still making random laughing and squealing noises.  The paroxysm was beyond my control; the euphoria of my experience would definitely take time–and therapy–to remove.  A minute later, as I was subconsciously afraid, my dad appeared at the foot of the stairs, staring at me drenched, bare-foot, and with an ecstatic grin on my face at the front door. 

  He told me I woke him up, so I galumphed over to him like an old, deranged, and inordinately jubilant man, to explain to him what had happened.  I explained in hushed and awed tones about the lightning, Zeus, the heavens, the apocalypse, everything!  After I finished my story he gazed at me through his half-sealed eyes, unimpressed, and told me again that I had woke him.  I apologized and after he had ascended the stairs once more, I went fumbling for the camcorder to record my impressions moments after my awesome encounter with nature. 

  And to Xanga I have come next, to let the world know of a moment that vanished in an ungracious amount of time, the amount of time it takes to do activities as inconsequential as saying a few words, or walking a few steps, and yet was still able to be so qualitatively saturated, that it will live in my heart forever.  It happened in such a fast and dramatic fashion, it now seems it barely happened, and yet I know it did, because it has stained in my mind the indelible awe that I felt in the second I truly experienced awesomeness. 

  • 5:07 am
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