THUNDERSTORM

It is probably a good night to write or at least think about writing with the covers pulled over your head.  Though I confess it is difficult writing or even thinking in a violent thunderstorm with sharp lightning flashing through the window every 3 minutes.  The ceiling fan slows, stops, then turns and the lamp blinks on as if controlled by a ghost.  The internet goes in and out.  No connection. So, you don’t use it during the storm.

Outside car alarms echo in a parking lot.  You’re alone and afraid that one moment without communication, without the internet you feel totally alone.  Has the internet become your new best friend in a place like this?  I wonder…
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It is a dark and stormy night.  A cliché that reads better than living it.  

I am tempted to retreat to the bathroom.  There are no windows in either of them, just a ceiling vent you click off or on for air.  Yes, I could shut the door in there…sit in the tub with my head covered until all that thunder and lightning subsides.

In the living room the fish (Caleb--so named after Steinbeck’s Caleb Trask in “East of Eden” --and Draper, Swifty, Cliffy named for Henry Slesar characters—three lawyers--on “Edge of Night”) don’t seem to notice or even care about that sound disturbing me so or their own light going off and then back on.  What do they care since I'm seen as their food source and probably nothing more...​

Silence in the house is broken by rolling thunder that makes me shudder, wish I wasn't so alone.  I am in the middle room sitting on a sofa, looking into space and listening to thunder and four clocks ticking in the dark hall like somebody’s heart.  A nervous, sweaty person waiting to come in. The clocks represent Time Zones for New York, San Francisco, Rome (Italy) and Peshawar (Pakistan).

The blue lights are steady now on the Wi-Fi box. I get up, shut the door and lock it.  Then return to reading a Post article I started by Steve Cozzo about New York’s 40+ rooftop bar and restaurant establishments.  Cozzo writes that “for a world-capital city, New York was long embarrassingly low on open-to-the-public views. We had the Empire State Building’s and 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s observation decks, but the loss of Windows on the World, and the closings of several Midtown restaurants, left us with precious few high perches from which to enjoy the skyline, the harbor and the boroughs beyond.
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FAVORITE POST HEADLINE TODAY

"Pantless doctor busted..."

​Today’s new towers proclaim New York’s extreme turnaround from the rotten-apple days. New data by NYPD CompStat showed a decline in homicides from last year’s 167 to 161 through July 22 in 2018. The 4.4 million New York City residents with jobs last year was the all-time high. Our 4.5 percent unemployment rate is the lowest since 1976. Nearly 63 million visitors came here last year, up 2.3 million over 2016. (Presumably they were drawn by more than pharmacies and ATMs.)
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Nowhere is all this more gloriously on display than from high-up vantage points. They reflect a city rightly in awe of itself, no matter how much sniping the idea draws in some capitalism-hating precincts. They celebrate a mostly marvelous urban transformation that residents, workers and visitors thrill to see with their own eyes.”

An article such as that will delight President Trump because “he’s responsible” for everything good.  So righteous our President, America’s most valuable player in any storm.