Lifting Fog

We’ve been dancing this dance for over a year now, guys (happy 1st anniversary, btw!), so you know pretty well by now that I’m a veritable bottomless pit of imaginative excuses. I’ve got material for every occasion, like:

Holiday laziness!

To explain my month-long vacation from Lifting Fog (shorter than the last one by two weeks!) would mean painful recollections of Russian Roulette tournaments, extraterrestrial probing, and drug addiction… (Jan. 15, 2009)

Seasonal affective disorder!

…undergoing radical eyebrow surgery, or doing missionary work in Zambia, or taking the LSATs (Oct. 17, 2008)

Indecisive feelings on a movie I desperately wanted to like!

One week later I sat down to watch the movie again, this time in IMAX. It seemed right to offer Watchmen, a film so unavoidably tangled in decades of hype and expectation, a second chance. (Mar. 31, 2009)

My dedication to time-sensitive blogging is the stuff that wins lifetime achievement awards. But two weeks ago, I was finally afforded a LEGITIMATE reason not to blog when my apartment — a three-bedroom pre-war in Hamilton Heights — started drowning in dirty pipe water. Ceilings caving in. Hallways flooding. THE APOCALYPSE, FAM. This being 2009, though, and my priorities being well-organized…I was able to tweet the whole rusty mess.

So here’s what happened: a pipe burst three floors up, raining its dirty contents onto each floor below and lending everyone’s week a truly memorable start. The flooding wasn’t bad at first, just sort of drip dripping onto the bathroom floor. But then it didn’t stop…and the ceiling leak grew…then, lonely, added NEW leaks. With no way to stop the flow of water ourselves, my roommates and I could only attempt to barricade our rooms (bye, towels!) and stem the rising tide with buckets and good vibrations. Like Tweeting!

Knowing that our message was being seen by literally tens millions of people helped make the ordeal that much less trying, reminding us that there were people out there like Jon Favreau and Not Tina Fey who could share our pain, and maybe offer a prayer. The prospect of our situation (#Floodfest2009) becoming a Trending Topic, too, only bolstered our resolve to MAKE THIS SUFFERING KNOWN to the masses checking their phones and browsers. One Love.

Of course as in any tragedy of this scale, it can’t be all fun and games. Dark times came a ‘twittering later on, undeterred by the positive energy we had been projecting into the world. And they came with a vengeance.

All our best efforts were shot down, drowned in the unrelenting flood waters. No amount of acoustic guitar-playing was going to dry our hallway… or our tears. It wasn’t long before we had nearly given up all hope, rocking back and forth in our ergonomically designed desk chairs to the sweet sounds of a familiar hymn…

As dramatic as it would have been to die a Twittered-death, you know by now that we (well, I…) survived, and two weeks later I find myself struggling through tears to recount the ordeal. Ten minutes after that final “farewell” tweet, the ceiling stopped crying pipe water. The flooding abated. Hope returned. I emerge from #Floodfest2009 a stronger person, confident in my ability to both protect the lives of my roommates and uphold the high standards of journalism you’ve come to expect from Lifting Fog.

… And best of all, you can never give me any shit for not blogging! Emotional turmoil! I’m lovin’ it.

Tags: Apocalypse, New York Minute, Pre-Wars, Twitter, Urban Flooding

This entry was posted on July 26, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Bildungsroman, Technocentricity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.