Recently I saw a video online of starlings making miraculous shapes over Rome, but tonight I think that the pigeons over the Falafel King will have to be miracle enough.
Today the state got shaken by the shoulders by a major storm threatening tornadoes.
Downed trees and broken buildings and power lines and an overturned semi-truck blocked roads throughout South Carolina.
My partner roused me from a nap to tell me that half of Bamberg’s main street is down. But when I looked out of her front windows in Columbia, everything was eerie but nothing was destroyed.
I found an article today titled ‘Critical Infrastructure Is Sinking Along the East Coast,’ which feels dramatic and pertinent, but I had to purchase a subscription or try one month free if I wanted to figure out what was going on there.
There is a piece I found that reports the deaths of a woman and man in Georgia today resulting from the storm. She was taking cover in the bathroom of her mobile home when a tornado flipped it, speculatively three or four times. He was driving on the highway when a tree dislodged and jumped across his car. Interspersed in the article is an ad for ‘The Horrifying Truth About CBD,’ and then the ‘Top New York Gut Doctor: Doing This Once A Day May Help You Poop’ and ‘Amazon Hates If You Do This, But They Can’t Stop You (Try This Tonight.)’
Cassidy Spencer is a writer and columnist for Free Times. Photo by Alyssa Thorn/Special to the Post & Courier
In the not-novel arc of late capitalism, tragedy is padlocked to paywalls and paid sponsors, feeling beyond arms-length. But in truth, tragedy is beyond arms-length to Columbia residents today. We’ve just skated by on the lettuce edge of this storm. The city has been decimated by storms before, flooded into dysfunction, and many battened down their respective hatches today for fear of this. But it did not come. And on the drive home from my nap, before rehearsal and then dinner, the sky was two-toned: gray and thick near the earth, and inexplicably opening into heaven-yellow and soft pink above. For that afternoon drive home, the city felt stock-still, patting down its own body parts in recognition.
There’s a lot of talk about the calm before the storm, but I’d like to hear about the calm after. Clouds are at a walking pace, walking somewhere, strolling into town for dinner, the winter trees and bushes whisper-hush birds in pairs of twos and threes that loop across what feels like a raw world. Columbia is all right.
I can't help but think about climate change in these moments of fabricated or real catastrophe. Opened up into something so grand, fluffy and easy, perusing. Clouds only moseying along through the most stunning majesty that the sky can eke out from under the weight of us, of people.
This practice, the lassoing-in of life and tragedy for story, calls to mind a monologue in Chekhov's "The Seagull." I read it last week for the sake of a play I'm working on locally, and the monologue is spoken by a novelist. He conveys how uncomfortable it feels to him to be a writer, how it's difficult to sink into lived moments — to truly live them — because he’s already in the written work, trying to reference the moment in footnote.
I’m Cassidy Spencer, moving forward I’m going to be here in this column with you, trying to capture the storms that pass through this city; culturally, socially, metaphysically, literally. Introducing: ‘Is This Thing On.’
