I'm worrying more than most about the tropical depression moving toward the Yucatan tonight. Hopefully it will get tired over land and only bring light, cooling showers to the Gulf of Mexico, instead of picking up speed, scattering the fleet, and driving twenty-foot waves of suffocating brown sludge over the fragile coast, spilling the Gulf's spill into towns and fields in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. That is a big enough worry, to be sure.
But it might all be done in my name. The National Hurricane Center, like an eager parent, has the name of the first hurricane of 2010 picked out and ready to go: Alex.
Maybe a more apt comparison would be to the first bullet in the gun. BP doesn't expect to stop making its mess before August, during which two full months of hurricane season (supposed to be a busy one this year) shall pass. There are hurricanes in the Gulf every year. The gun will fire. I just wish the first bullet wasn't signed by me.
That old trope, about a far-away butterfly beating its wings, comes to mind. The NHC has had its names lined up for years. And this tropical storm is not the product of one lost butterfly, but a pattern of weather that has been unbroken since shortly after the ice age. But this goddamn mess--when did the air first stir that brought us this disaster in April?
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