rebel machine

What with my renewed interest in posting here, I was going to start on a schedule of posting assorted musical debris and pop-culture etcetera, along with a long-overdue links update and some other tidy-up business -- but being in the Twin Cities right now, I'm still feeling pretty shook after the 35W bridge collapse. The process of realizing what was going on was disorienting: at first I thought it was the 94 bridge, which I take to and from work four days a week; learning which one it actually was didn't make things any better when I recalled how many times I've gone under it down River Road on some sort of family outing. And flipping from a channel which just had a static, empty horizon-line shot of where the bridge used to be to a channel that had a helicopter's-eye view of the wreckage felt completely unreal; it felt stranger still watching the choppy, 1-frame-a-second video footage of the actual collapse on the CNN website. It's the kind of disaster scenario that you don't really think about until it actually happens, a strange combination of the horrifying and the improbable -- this kind of thing almost never happens without some sort of ship collision or natural disaster causing it. Unlikelier still, though, is the fact that (though nearly two dozen missing people need to be accounted for) the death toll is still in the single digits, considering this all happened during rush hour/Twins game traffic. (I still have a hard time believing that everyone on this school bus survived.) It could have been far worse, and whether you believe in some sort of higher power or not, there's somebody somewhere out there to thank for the fact that it wasn't.

posted by Nate P. @ 12:53 PM