EmURKURKergency!

I missed that whole 11/11/11/11:11 thing, and the test of the Emergency Alert System, and the last four raptures, and it was all due to inattention. Many people feel that things like the eleventh second of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month in the eleventh year of the century are very special and should be observed. It won't ever come back again, they say, which does little to distinguish it from all the other seconds piling up out there. I admit I often lack reverence. For instance, I have trouble manufacturing a big personal whoop about New Year's, now that I'm no longer on the make and don't drink myself blind. But I had planned to pay attention on 11/11. I had it on good authority (Facebook) that it is a date of transformation from third density into Higher Consciousness. The sacred date of 11/11/11 is a portal into Higher Dimensions, giving us unprecedented Love/Light supportive energy for our transformation.

And if that were so, there should be some sort of chime of singularity that could actually be felt during that second, like maybe the Higgs Boson coming up and giving you a tiny tap ding! on your forehead. Something you could feel if you were paying attention, which I wasn't. I was eating oatmeal.

Same thing with all the raptures. I had them all on my calendar, but when they arrived I had gotten busy with something else and missed the whole thing. I don't know if they happened or not. All the people who should be missing are people I wouldn't miss if they were gone anyway, so I have no way of knowing.

The one that really bums me out is the Emergency Alert System, which was scheduled for a grand nationwide test last Thursday. I wanted to tune in just to see if they'd come up with a new alert sound, because I'm tired of the old one. It sounds sort of accidental, as though they didn't pay someone a lot of money to come up with it, like they did with the sound of your letter getting sent on an iMac, or the howdy-do bells of your Windows machine coming on. It sounds like someone repeatedly stepping on a duck that has swallowed a toad, only digital, so that the sound comes out in little cubical bleats. As good as your TV screen looks when it's trying to resolve itself digitally and is busted up into squares, that's how good the EAS sounds. I couldn't believe it when they rolled it out for the first time in the nineties. Pathetic.

It did replace an even worse sound, a prolonged two-note warble wherein the two notes involved shouldn't even have been in the same room. That one went on for like a whole minute, too. They started testing it when I was in sixth grade, right about the time the country was working on ways to scare the pants off its children so as to keep them in line, only a lot of them were twelve-year-old boys and nothing works on them. We drilled in diving under our school desks. The idea was that the cleanup from a mass instantaneous incineration would be easier if we were all crumpled up in rows and columns. We all learned to loathe Khrushchev and the Commies, which is what we used to call Muslims. And the Emergency Broadcast System would test itself on our radios with some frequency. The Brewster radio was a small bakelite number we kept in the kitchen, and Arthur Godfrey lived in it. I guess the first few times we heard the test we filled our shorts, as intended, but after a while, it was just an annoying interruption we learned to ignore.

Which is why, when someone did accidentally set off the national emergency tone for imminent nuclear annihilation, in 1971, the nation's shorts remained pristine.

That was one of the things that the new Emergency Alert System was meant to address. They kept the alerts much shorter. You only have to wait ten seconds to find out if you have time to finish wiping before jumping into a hole in the ground.

Anyway, it turns out that if I had tuned in to the latest nationwide test, I would have heard nothing at all, because it didn't work. At least here. And that would have been appropriately alarming. "Nothing at all" is the very same sound that cougars are said to make when they're stalking you just above the trail. "Nothing at all" is such an unusual sound these days that it would really stand out. Still, I think they can come up with a better, more alarming sound, one that will really get people's attention in a hurry.

I nominate the HORKinnaHORKinnaHORKinna sound that immediately precedes an incoming hairball deposit on the blanket you're sleeping under. Call me patriotic, but I can be awake and ready to launch fur in one second.

Get Me My Formica Hat

The news wasn't good on NPR. We were driving home in a hailstorm listening to speculation about radiation clouds emanating from Japan. The planet had made a little adjustment in its outerwear, as it must do--it doesn't mean anything by it--but the human consequences were devastating, and still unfolding. Finally Terry Gross's show came on, the hail let up, and we were just settling in to hear a very old man sing his own composition, "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," even though he had just died, when the Emergency Broadcast System began bleating away. It was not preceded by "this is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System." It just busted right in. My first reaction was to want to pull over to the right side of the road, but that was inappropriate, and we waited for the bleating to stop and tried to figure out which direction Japan was.

Then a man came on and said there was a severe thunderstorm warning for central Multnomah county and that everyone should take shelter inside a building and stay away from windows.

This still sounds pretty silly to a girl who grew up near Washington, D.C., where we had a severe thunderstorm every afternoon between 4pm and 4:30pm during the months of July and August. I always loved thunderstorms and never was afraid of them. They were so refreshing, and I would stand at the front door looking out and smelling the ozone and sticking my tongue against the wire screen in the door. I liked the taste of of wet screen door. "The littlest Brewster kid is licking the screen door again," I imagine our neighbors used to tell each other, but they're probably dead now. I don't know what sort of metals might have been in the screen that appealed to me so, but I don't think they were harmful. Shoot, in those days, our mothers used to scrub behind our ears with asbestos pads to get the lead paint off. We were made of stouter stuff and it didn't bother us a bit. We were made of stouter stuff and it didn't bother us a bit.

The storms were plenty loud, but I liked to go out in them. For a blessed half hour we could be drenched in seventy-degree water and begin to remember the point of living again. Then the sun would come back out and the steam would hover in the air and the thunder would rumble away in the distance like Satan cackling and our sweat would revert to an inert slime that nothing but a trip to Gifford's Ice Cream could compensate for.

Anyway, here in Portland we have thunder so infrequently that a little bout of it that sounds  like celestial indigestion will cause people to remark on it all the next day. A severe thunderstorm warning hardly seemed worth jumping up and down about. What the Emergency Broadcast System was really designed for, as we kids who grew up in the shadow of the Capitol well knew, was to warn us of an imminent nuclear strike. We practiced diving under our desks with our hands over our heads, utilizing our nation's primary defense, Formica.

But the last time we had a severe thunderstorm warning here, it knocked the scoff right out of me. It screamed down the valley bending trees parallel to the ground, which is especially impressive in Douglas fir country. Unanchored Chihuahuas vanished. Comb-overs were revealed. Bits of minced weatherman and other debris rocketed by. It was an emphatic sucker, and I was impressed. So this time we took shelter and stayed away from windows.

No matter what Dave might tell you, it's not my fault that the nearest shelter happened to be a fabric store, or that he was the only one with a wallet.