nobody's fault but my own
While tsunami warnings and earthquakes were creating panic amongst Northern Californians (and my mom, who doesn't quite grasp that there are hundreds of miles north of the Bay Area that are still considered California), I was miles away, staring at this. B*tches, now that's a fault line. Earthquakes have severely shook much of the Colca Canyon at various times in its history. Earthquakes originating here have damaged whole portions of the ctiy of Arequipa, a solid 2.5 hour drive from the photographed fault. You try to keep this out of your mind as a rickety bus winds you around narrow roads, as you take a harrowing trip around the face of a canyon. You try not to look down into the canyon, because it's a deep chasm, drops off suddenly and without warning. Just like you suspect the ground beneath your feet might do should the plates decide to shift again.
And yet I feel more unsteady here, back. The plates seem more poised to separate, the ground seems more apt to swallow me up. Had the Richter scale tipped, had I fallen victim to the wrath of the Colca Canyon, nature would have spoken. With nature, there can be no argument. But these little earthquakes, the internal ones that rend me, the ones that pose unanswerable questions and cause infinite loops of confusion, they are far more cruel. After all, they're self-imposed, ought to be controllable. They are the search for meaning where meaning may not exist, or may never definitively be established.
Completely off-topic (and now you know I'm officially returning back to my usual form), if you claim to dislike Summertime by Big Willy Style (who I'll admit is a jacka** of cosmic proportions these days), I must conclude one of the following is true: a) you're a liar, or b) you're 190 years old and only listen to The Summer Wind by Ole Blue Eyes because that rap stuff the kids are listening to hurts your ears, or c) you've never actually experienced summer on the east coast. Yes, I said it!
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