The Single Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Heard

Now that I think about it, I probably give one statement or another the title of “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” about once a month. Either someone says something directly to me or I hear it on T.V. and I say, “Holy crap! That is the single dumbest thing I have ever heard in my entire fucking life!” Maybe a discussion about whatever it is ensues or maybe it doesn’t – but I can’t ever think of a time that I stopped and thought, “Is that really, honestly, seriously the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life? I think it is.” Until today…

I was trying to get everybody sat down and rounded up at the dinner table last night and I was running around like a jackass. Filling in the tiny gaps between everybody screaming about how they would rather play than eat dinner was the local nightly news. It was about the time in the broadcast where the aging hot chick weatherbot was attempting to read the teleprompter while simultaneously navigating the bluescreen behind her. Just about the time that I thought she was going to explode from overtaxing her brain I heard her say something to the effect of, “We are really trying to stress flash flood awareness this year because flash flood awareness is really important. Did you know that in this area, more people are affected by flash floods than tornadoes?”

Fortunately, one of the little ones chose this moment to crash something into the hardwood floor and save me from having to hear any more and end up committing earicide (again). Unfortunately, their efforts were too late, I had heard the dumb part. Don’t get me wrong – a flash flood will fuck…you…up. One minute you’re rolling in your SUV – headed to the mall or some other adventure in excess and BLAM! A flash flood whisks away your vehicle, carries it a few miles and then tosses it off a bridge into the river below, where you promptly drown. Sucks. One person dead, three hundred basements flooded and a dozen businesses temporarily shut down…stupid flash flood.

Later that afternoon your widow is using a shop vac to clean up the flooded basement – wishing your dumb ass hadn’t gotten thrown off that bridge so that you could clean this shit up. Suddenly, the sky turns a funny orange-grey and the wind starts blowing things around outside in awkward directions. Before your widow can figure out what the strange wind noise actually is, she hears a new noise…a friggin’ badass diesel-electric train barreling at top speed toward her friggin’ house! When she finally gets upstairs to a real window, she sees Satan’s personal spinning black vortex of death in the distance – inching toward the house. Before she can get down to the basement, the tornado is on her – she thought she had some time, but the fact that the tornado was coming straight at her home made it appear to be moving slower than it was.

It is all she can do to drop to the floor as the entire roof pulls off and careens into the neighbor’s new sunporch. Your widow puts both hands over her already-damned skull and begins absorbing the shots. Family portraits, rocks from the neighbor’s ‘wish garden’ and other assorted sundries pummel your wife into submission. At 300 miles per hour, even the laundry hurts pretty fucking bad. It is at this point that the City’s warning sirens begin wailing.

The entire ordeal is just about over and it looks like she’s going to live to tell about it…Until the tornado decides its last action in the neighborhood will be to pick the entire house up, throw it a few hundred feet in the air, pulverize everything into tiny wooden chunks and then gently sprinkle a neighboring state with the remains. The last thought to run through her mind was,

“I felt so much more affected by that flash flood this afternoon.”

Saying that “more people in the area are affected by flash floods than by tornadoes” is like saying that more people are affected by air pollution than by shotgun blasts to the abdomen.  I can say that without any doubt, the words that weather lady said to me this evening were by far the dumbest collection of English words to ever reach my brain. From now on, whenever I utter that sentence, I don’t really mean it…unless I’m talking about that weather woman.

Just as a public service

-if there’s a flash flood – seek higher ground.

-if there’s a tornado – seek the basement.

-if there’s a flash flood and tornado at the same time- tread water in the basement –  it’s your only hope.