DFO Radio: Wanton Destruction

I’ve never lived through a major natural disaster before.  I saw my share of Nor’easters growing up in New England, but nothing that cost us more than a few days worth of school (I grew up in Wethersfield, which made the process of listening for school closures on the radio agonizing – there’s nothing that breaks your spirit as a kid than sitting through ten minutes of “Avon…closed…Bridgeport…half day…Concord…closed…” to find out that your own town’s roads are perfectly clear and school will be starting right on time). Hurricane Bob barely touched us; we didn’t even lose power.  The Northridge quake hit nine months before I came to California for college, and there hasn’t been a major one since I’ve been here.  The storms in both Johannesburg and on the coast in South Africa were pretty dazzling (once I counted over a hundred visible lightning flashes in two minutes while looking out over the water) but aside from turning the water brown and making the waves unrideable (unless you were fucking crazy), the backwash from the cyclones hitting Madagascar was never more than some heavy rain and a stiff breeze.

I always thought it would be exciting to experience something like a tornado or a wildfire or something like that until I met a man who’d lived through Hurricane Ivan in Grenada.  He told me about seeing the roof pulled off his house, and how he’d grabbed a bottle of rum and crawled into a cabinet.  That sounds exciting, but it was clear from the expression on his face that it was pretty awful.  He’d lost his boat and everything else and ended up saying “fuck it” and hitting the road.  I met another guy who had been hit by lightning.  Again, it was clear from his retelling that it was a pretty traumatic experience.  It wasn’t an exciting experience. It didn’t give him magic powers.  It’s just hurt a lot and sent him to the hospital.

So I realize that I’ve actually been incredibly lucky.

Last week a special guest from Battlebots dropped by for a visit and left the studio in shambles.  All he left behind was this playlist.