Freaking About Tsunamis

Recruiting is brutal. It was hot and her recruiting chair didn’t have an umbrella. I think the school needs to buy her a chair with an umbrella. And a big bottle of Patron Tequila.

Softball is a slow game. Nothing happens for a long time, then there is a  hectic amount of shit that happens all at once.

She was watching a particular catcher. She doesn’t really look at skills–well, I shouldn’t say that. She looks at skills, but more than skills she looks at the kid’s attitude, and the how the kid’s parents behave.. If she sees some bad parental behavior, she leaves. Fortunately, this kid’s parents were chill. So we stayed for 3 or 4 innings, she saw what she wanted to see, then we left.

Our hotel was crawling with athletic teams. Kids with parents and coolers and the pool was packed, and loud, and the whole place had a soccer camp vibe.

We took showers and naps and played on the Ipads and I read this really frightening piece from the New Yorker about how a big earthquake and tsunami is due to hit the Pacific Northwest in the next, they-don’t-know-how-many-years, but soon, and now this is all I can think of.

Because of Em and Scott and Obie. I now want them to move. And they are moving, next month, to a new place, a little bit closer to the coast.

I want them to move away from the ocean. Far away. So the tsunami won’t kill them. I don’t know if they have seen this article yet or not, or what they think about it, but I, personally, do not want to move to Portland anymore.

I do not want to die in a natural disaster. I want to die peacefully. In my sleep. When I am 104.

Just the thought of everything I love in the world dying in a natural disaster makes me physically ill, and unable to sleep.  I want them to move away from Portland. They can stay in Oregon, but they need to back it way up. Way far away from the ocean. (This article said that the effects of the earthquake will be felt as far east as Sacramento.)

But they won’t move. They love it there. It’s their home. They will say that they can’t think of that. But the probability is 1 in 3. Within how many years? I don’t know. I forget. I would go back and re-read the article but I don’t want to. The article makes me feel sick. (Em, if you are reading this, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I just wish you would move. This makes me so scared.)

Buddhists would say that I am feeling all these emotions because I am attached. Attachment is the cause of all suffering. Exactly. But how do you not be attached? I have also just started reading a book called The Surrender Experiment by the same guy who wrote The Untethered Soul, Mickey Singer. I am only a few pages in, but I think that his premise is that you must surrender to whatever happens. When you try to control things, that’s when everything goes haywire. Control is an illusion.

I guess. But I am really not there yet. I am not evolved to that point. I need to go and meditate. Right now. I need to find a way of framing this kind of stuff so that I can live with it.