The clocks turned from green to red

So, OK, you know how I like to write about shit that doesn't mean anything, like teevee and whatnot.

But there was this horrific fire a couple of miles from our house tonight, which my husband and our kid drove by AS IT HAPPENED -- they saw the initial fireball (she said tonight as we were settling in to read a few more pages of Little House on the Prairie, "I saw de little bit of fire, and den de BIG fire!!") and Mr. Gleemonex, like many others, thought it was a plane crash (we're more or less directly in the path of trans-pacific flights taking off from SFO, and he and I are kind of permanently weirded out by the fact that we came back from our trip to Maui, our first legitimate non-family non-work [as in, 100% our choice to use commercial aviation] Vacation together, on Sept. 9, 2001). As I'm writing this, nearly 60 homes are burned completely to the ground, at least one person is dead and dozens of others are critically injured, the fire is still burning … it's fucking HORRIBLE.

And the thing is, we can't know, about this stuff, which is what makes it so fucking terrifying to think about. After 9/11, I developed a crushing, twisting fear of airplanes, airports, and flying (yay Xanax, eh? cures what ails ya) -- but eventually I realized, fuck it -- every fucking DAY is fraught with danger. Why get so torqued about THIS kind of one in a million danger? I've always been a fear-riddled person -- there is a thing I will tell you about someday, a near-death experience which I remember in sickeningly lucid detail that sends me into fantods today, thirty years after the fact, which undoubtedly marked my psyche -- but my fears are always worse in the realm of "normal person, going about his/her normal day, when DEATH COMES SCREAMING OUT OF THE BLUE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH" type of thing.

Say you got home earlier than usual from work Thursday. Six-fifteen to your usual 6:45. You thought you'd start dinner cause damn, you all are eating late these days, or maybe since nobody's home yet, you might play hooky for ten minutes from your feeding-and-provisioning duties and read ONE GODDAMN SECTION of your still-unread Sunday NYT. You sit down in the chair by the window, catching the last of the September light, and