carnival
i’d fallen asleep in a puddle of vomit beside my bed when the tornado hit.
tonight, more than eight years later, the fatalities are climbing in west texas after the worst flooding "in recent history."
in recent history.
it's an infuriating term.
one the media started using in the last decade or two.
one that offers nothing of informational value to a news story, but tells the audience, "you should feel shocked."
david muir is on site, narrating b roll footage that could be any natural disaster from the last half century.
there's something especially gross about this to me.
it's tragedy porn, is what it is.
the narration style of muir's voiceover belongs, i don’t know…in a roland emmerich trailer, maybe.
it does not belong in a report about dozens of children dying.
i was once nearly the target of a local news crew, one filming tragedy porn after a tornado hit our house.
that was when we lived in dallas.
remembering it now, contempt rises in me: contempt fueled by two months of vodka bought, since i relapsed, one liter at a time from r.j.’s liquor store.
"a precious child's camp t-shirt and single lost shoe litter the mud on the receding shore, gut-wrenching reminders of what this small community has lost as they work desperately against all hope," says muir.
that's the gist of what he says anyway.
when did the news start this indulgent bathos?
it's not even close to journalism.
it’s just barely bad screenplay writing.
my heart goes out to these families and communities.
everyone's does.
how could it be any other way in the face of such immense loss?
we need to know what's being done, what to do, who's helping them.
but they aren't reporting on that.
even in the digital age, the worst tragedies still pull us all before our screens, to sit and stare in collective horror.
and that’s become the point, to stare. for the point certainly isn't information. it’s entertainment.
we’ve come not here to know.
we have simply come to see.
"disasterbating," i heard it called in a recovery group recently.
muir and his cameraman spot an elderly couple exiting a battered house through a missing front door.
rushing the couple, his camera crew close behind, muir demands to know how they escaped the rising waters.
the wife is eager to share her experience, leading everyone to a small yard on one side of the house.
i mute the video.
as they follow the couple, and notice that several liquor bottles are visible, littered across the mud.
are natural disasters especially deadly to alcoholics?
it makes sense that a lot of us are probably passed out when they sweep through.
that's where i was when the tornado hit: passed out in my own upchuck.
hours after it was over, when i awoke, the sun was out.
it was quiet.
mud was everywhere in our backyard, all up the side of our house and caking the sliding glass door in our bedroom.
every pane of glass in our house had massive cracks.
the enormous tree in our backyard had been torn from its roots and tossed like some giant toddler’s misplaced toy into our pool.
what in the gay hell have i done? I wondered in horror.
the power was out.
my phone was dead.
i had absolutely no idea what’d happened.
i staggered to the front door, then opened it.
the trail of destruction the funnel had left stretched what might have been forever in both directions.
trees were downed.
houses destroyed.
fences scattered.
standing in my driveway, right next to my car, which had been crushed beneath a massive branch, were two men, from a local news crew.
they turned.
the cameraman flipped on his light, nearly blinding me.
i slammed the door shut.
in my vodka-fueled fog, i hadn't registered a tornado, not even a storm.
i genuinely thought that i had wrought this disaster, and destroyed my little world.
i sank to the floor and sobbed.
when the well was dry, i wondered what great terror of mine my poor neighbors had survived.
the elderly woman muir is interviewing stands in the mud now, waving her hands about her head.
the old man is crying.
when she sees, she reaches for him, and he sweeps forward, gathering her in an iron embrace.
i unmute them, as the man turns his back to the camera.
david muir steps out of frame as the camera pans in.
"almost forty years together, and tonight, at last, back on dry land," he proudly explains.
i wipe the tears from my face and close the tab.
then i navigate to the google news page.
the one i bookmarked long ago.
the one with a feed that's been personalized to my interests.