Metaphysics and Earthquakes

Life doesn't come without risks. When I graduated college from Indiana, I was always met with the same question from my midwest friends when I told them I was moving to San Francisco:

Me: I'm moving to San Francisco.

Them: What are you...gay?

Me: No, but I'm willing to try new things.

Them: That's nasty.

Me: Forget it, let's go play football.

Wait, I meant this question:

Me: I'm moving to San Francisco.

Them: Aren't you afraid of earthquakes?

Me: I think everyone's afraid of earthquakes, but it isn't going to stop me from moving to San Francisco.

Them: You're crazy. You belong with all the other nuts out there.

Me: Ljljjadouevnahdhfasdfjv jkhyiyeuppnnpe!

Truth is, when I really thought about it, the reality of living right on top of one of the most active faultlines in the world (which, incidentally, had previously destroyed the city a hundred years ago) was not something that gave me warm fuzzies. So, employing some best practices of what people do help cope their fear, I went out an anesthetized myself with beer.

At the time, I found the question a bit misplaced (the one about earthquakes). Why did everyone have such a phobia about earthquakes in particular? Surely they are terrifying and extremely destructive, but two weeks before my graduation party in Bloomington, Indiana, a tornado had ripped through a couple of houses about 5 miles from my house. I didn't see a mass exodus of people who deemed tornado alley "too dangerous" to live in. I did see a local drunk by the name of Wayne who ran up and down the street proclaiming the end of the world, but he'd lost some credibility when he cried wolf earlier in the year proclaiming ultimate doom when they opened up a La Bamba's burrito stand just off campus. Beer clearly didn't help Wayne.

I think this is a phenomenon of human nature that is just a derivative of Donald Rumsfeld's axiom about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. This is a known known, that you choose to make an unknown known, because living in a place where your known known is an impending disaster that could rip your house in half, turn a 5-mile long suspension bridge into a rubber band, while possibily causing an undewater vibration so fierce it causes 50-foot waves to attack your city afterwards, you tend to get selective with your memory.

So, instead of thinking about those things, we walk down the street blaring Nine Inch Nails on our iPods on the way to work. We meet up with our friends for dinner, eat overpriced, but delectable food, drink too much and tell lots of bad jokes that we somehow still find funny. We sniff the roses (or the urine if you are walking by the Transbay Terminal), walk the hills, argue about how stupid/visionary our Board of Supervisors are, and we pour a tub of melted butter on the floor and roll around in it under candlelight under the aural fixations of Yani. You know, normal stuff whose particulars could be replaced with the particulars of any place. Yet, we sit on this brittle crust which could smote us in the blink of an eye, and yet we rarely confront the possibility unless we are forced to.

Today was one of those days.

When I read an article titled: Southern San Andreas Fault Waiting to Explode: Report, my sphincter tighened up so small it was measured at the subatomic level:

The southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles, which has been still for more than two centuries, is under immense stress and could produce a massive earthquake at any moment, a scientist said on Wednesday.

Yuri Fialko, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California, said that given average annual movement rates in other areas of the fault, there could be enough pent-up energy in the southern end to trigger a cataclysmic jolt of up to 10 meters (32 ft).

"The observed strain rates confirm that the southern section of the San Andreas fault may be approaching the end of the interseismic phase of the earthquake cycle," he wrote in the science journal Nature.

A sudden lateral movement of 7 to 10 meters would be among the largest ever recorded.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was produced by a sudden movement of the northern end of the fault of up to 21 ft.

It's never comforting when some geeky guys in glasses with their gadgets, sensory du-dads and computer simulations tell you that the ground underneath is WAITING TO EXPLODE! I felt a tinge of guilt realizing that I felt relief over the fact that this report put Los Angeles in danger and not San Francisco. But clearly, it was a stern reminder of the place my measley existence finds itself in this fragile, yet unforgiving world.

I think I'm gong to go anesthetize myself with beer....