October 2, 2002:
I'm standing at the stove, stirring pasta sauce. Sawing and hammering noises from downstairs: landlords renovating an empty apartment. There's the sound of a heavy truck rumbling up the busy boulevard. A very heavy truck, heavy enough to shake the building. It's 5:04 P.M., and that's not a truck.
Usually earthquakes are kindof fun. A slippery kind of side-to-side sway, like waves rocking a heavy boat. This earthquake is not fun. It's angry. It shakes from below, straight up-and-down, like some trapped and violent thing seeking escape.
The hammering stops. My stirring stops. The rumbling sound is faux brick facades falling to the sidewalk, for blocks up and down the boulevard.
People used to believe that cyclones were the focused anger of evil magicians, directed through the power of their spell like light through a lens. Malevolence underlay the destructive events which we now assign to our clocklike and impersonal vision of nature. That's how this feels. That there's a personal force at play, a great wellspring and reservoir of anger shaking the city from sheer rage.
This is the first time I've ever thought about my safety during an earthquake. What is it you're supposed to do? Leave the building? Get under a table? I decide to stand in a doorway. But I barely have time to take two steps before an entirely different thought forms and stops me where I stand.
I know the anger I'm sensing. It's mine. Flaring forth like cold flame from fractures formed in the surfaces of the sad and sorry world.
I see my wall of board-and-brick bookshelves begin to sway. Back-and-forth, leaning away from the wall, recoiling back, swaying a little farther into the room with each wave. This is a great wall of books, floor to ceiling, ten feet high by eighteen feet wide, two books deep on each shelf. I don't know what it weighs but it looks like half a ton. If those books fall it's gonna sound like the end of the world.
All this nightmare year. Evil and pain. Betrayal and loss. Helplessness, inability to fight back. Culminating in this climax of rage so strong it would take the world by the throat and shake its bones loose.
With a grin I focus intently on the shelves. "Fall! Fall!" A few more seconds and they'll crash, with a roar like Armageddon. Like - the building collapsing. Onto the heads of my lying, corrupt, evil, fuckhead landlords in the apartment below.
Anger has its own peculiar humor. A certain amount of destruction can be a good thing, a funny thing. Fall, bastards.
CCCCRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSHHHHHH! A profound and satisfying sound, like a filthy world being cleaned with a giant toilet brush. Bob and Alma, shithead landlords, scream like death, climb out the window, run into the street panting and shouting. I about fall down laughing. My living room's a pile of books and bricks several feet high. Crowned at its apex with a proud surviving volume which at this moment reminds me of the laurel wreaths worn by conquering generals as they take their triumphal chariot ride: Trotsky's My Life, photograph face up. The old man never looked so good.
Solipsism? That would be the logical thing. But it felt like I did it. To this day I'm sorry about the people who died.
That was the moment when I started my long journey back to health.