...beyond this dark house...

Last night saw me intending to go to bed at midnight so I could wake lovely and refreshed for school today. Alas, it did not happen quite that way for at midnight I was sucked into watching the news from where I emerged in a depressed anxiety about an hour afterwards. Lately the end of the world seems so much more immediate, and now it isn't even a question of if or when we will blow ourselves up. Mother Nature just might do it for us when we least expect it.

So have you guys heard about the Juan de Fuca ridge? It's an underground ridge of seismic and volcanic activity just off the coast of Vancouver Island, and is the intersection of four tectonic plates (Explorer, North American, Pacific and Juan de Fuco plates). These plates are moving in all three of the seismic motions: merging, diverging and transforming with relation to each other. The most dangerous is the Juan de Fuco and Explorer moving across each other as they both simultaneously start slipping under the North American plate. That is one hotbed of seismic activity - the word is that the pressure building under these motions is going to give way to what is called a megathrust earthquake the likes of which we've never seen. These megathrust quakes occur every few hundred years, is the projection, and the last BC megathrust occurred in 1700. At the time, western BC was barely populated, just a couple tribes of Native Americans scattered here and there. Were something like this to happen again, Vancouver Island would be obliterated, and the tsunami resulting would travel ACROSS the Pacific and slam into the Japanese Islands. They tell us now that we'll probably see that megathrust in our lifetime, or the next generation. Isn't that pleasant? I wonder if the Vancouverites know this.

I woke up in the middle of the night terrified that there was an earthquake in our house. In my dream, the shoddy foundation of the Blue House is the result of lying on a faultline ready to blow. There was no earthquake, but I had fallen out of my bed. Thereafter I couldn't sleep however, so I got up and listened to Carmina Burana. I tell you, there's nothing like Carmina Burana to make you feel as if the world really could end, and the day of judgement arrive, and everyone be left out of paradise for our sins. Felt much better, uh huh.