mask
The red mask is fierce, a demon. Not sure, but seems to me the green mask was happy, and I could be wearing it.
Times may have changed, but the Japanese tradition was that all actors were male, and the mask and costume signed whether the character was a man or a woman.
We are still storm refugees eight and a half months on, though at least back from South Walton into Bay County at PCB, driving once or twice a week Across The Bridge into Panama City, and trying to maintain the clown face refrain of optimism
and how much better it's all going to be afterward (I mean, yes, maybe so, but never again the same and I loved it exactly as it was, just as Panama City and I grew up and into my old age together ), I continue to try and work out in my mind WTH happened.
Not so much with my experience and failed expectation of a storm normally weakening before landfall to max ashore as the usual category 1 or 2 never a gardenia Category Five Hurricane; what I don't yet get is why the creature did its worst, aside from the direct hit and incredible damage at TAFB and Mexico Beach,
not on the right side as we expect, but in the left eyewall that gave Callaway, Millville, Springfield, and The Cove such horror, and apparently without even the brief respite of a few minutes in the eye, but the full three or four hours that were so devastating. I asked a weather friend, and she said the scientists were still working to understand that, why this time the left side was worse than the right side.
Life leaves images in the mind of certain instants and experiences, and a prominent image of mine is, a few days after October 10 when the roads were clear enough for one-lane traffic, driving into The Cove where I grew up, and my fury and overwhelming grief. I'm back there at least once a week, for church on Sunday if not other, and though I consciously suppress, all the feelings will return instantly if I allow.
But having learned in a speech course sixty years ago the slogan "Act Enthusiastic and You'll Be Enthusiastic, I'm trying to be positive of face and let it soak back into the mind and become optimism.
Optimism being the secular equivalent of what Hope is in religion, part of the biblical definition of Faith: Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1 NIV).
Working, I'm working on it. It's very slow coming, but I'm wearing the smiley face.
Some notes and links from this morning's curiosity
Radar imagery at landfall showed a final convective burst in the western eyewall, punching through Mexico Beach and then rotating into Panama City. This corresponds to the areas of catastrophic structural damage, where peak winds likely met or exceeded 150 mph.
Arc of Ruin: A blow-by-blow account of the destruction in our coastal and inland communities
Much remains to be figured out surrounding how and why Hurricane Michael played out the way it did, but here are some preliminary facts:
Michael was the strongest hurricane to ever strike the Florida Panhandle, reaching back to the beginning of even fragmentary historical records in 1851.
In terms of minimum central pressure at landfall, Michael’s 919 mb reading is the third-lowest ever in the continental U.S. — three millibars lower than Hurricane Andrew’s lowest pressure.
Here’s what’s unusual about Hurricane Michael
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