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[TRANSCRIPT]
[click, static]
(siren sounds)
[click, static]
Can you hear that?
(siren sounds)
[click, static]
There’s um—there’s a tornado. There’s a goddamn tornado. [click, static]
When it first sounded, I thought it was an attack siren, like the ones they used to play for school drills. When we’d have to hide under our desks and clutch onto the table legs like that would save us from a nuclear bomb.
[click, static]
I don’t know who they thought they were fooling.
[click, static]
I can’t believe I’m in actual fucking Kansas and there’s a tornado. It feels too cliche to be real, somehow.
[click, static]
Everything I know about tornadoes, I know from The Wizard of Oz. (chuckles) That’s really not fucking helpful at the moment, is it? I don’t have Toto or ruby slippers or a basement to hide in.
I can’t remember anything about what you’re supposed to do in a tornado other than going into a basement. But the siren started going when I was on the road and like I said I thought I was—I thought we were, you know, under attack because its the same goddamn noise, um, but then I—I saw in the distance—and you know, there’s nothing around me. I pulled over obviously but I don’t know if I should be driving away or if I should be looking for a bridge or an overpass...I think there’s something about bridges. They’re either the worst place to be or the best place to be.
[click, static]
Really fucking helpful, I know. [click, static]
I’ve already gone on a journey to a strange land, you know? That’s what the world feels like—like waking up in technicolor after being in black and white but...um, the reverse I guess. If I get caught up in the tornado, do you think I’ll go back? To the way that things were?
[click, static]
Back? I don’t know what I’m saying. Back where? I didn’t travel anywhere, there’s nothing to go back to unless I can figure out a way to invent time travel and stop whatever it was that happened.
[click, static]
I keep thinking about hell. In the sense of...is this hell? Sometimes I get that feeling of unreality, the strange sensation that I’m somehow outside of myself, looking at myself from just off to the side. It’s gotten worse since I left Pennsylvania. Maybe I really should look in the mirror more often. I barely even use the car mirrors, it’s not like there’s other drivers to be aware of, and maybe that’s the problem, there’s so little to be aware of around me that I feel hyper aware of me.
[click, static]
But what if we died? What if we died when we were trying to get away and all of this has been a kind of purgatory, a terrible punishing afterlife from a god with a twisted sense of humor?
[click, static]
Never mind, I’m just wigged out. The sound of the sirens is, um...it’s spooky, you know? Eerie. I guess that makes it a good warning system for tornadoes and potential nuclear threat because there’s something in the sound that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
[click, static]
It’s rattling me, somewhere deep down, in some hind brain that triggers my fight or flight. The tornado is still really far away and...
[click, static]
I thought—I thought I saw a tornado, but I can’t—I can’t see it anymore, but, who knows, maybe the emergency system is just malfunctioning but the sky looks so terribly gray, a kind of gray that’s got a little bit of green to it, like the atmosphere itself is feeling sick.
[click, static]
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. [click, static]
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