Spring Reverie

"A large area of rain with embedded thunderstorms began to move eastward across the area early on May 5th, producing locally heavy rains. A surface high pressure area over the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic, combined with the stationary frontal system over the Tennessee Valley, allowed southerly winds to strengthen across the area from the Gulf Coastal region. These southerly winds continued to bring abundant moisture into the southern Appalachian region, with dewpoint temperatures rising into the upper 60s on the 6th and 7th. The showers and thunderstorms which developed over the Tennessee Valley began to ‘train’ over the same areas causing continuous heavy rainfall across southeast Tennessee and extreme southwest North Carolina. During the four day rain event (beginning at midnight on May 5th and ending at midnight on May 8th), a bull’s eye of over twelve inches of rain was reported in McMinn County, TN at both Etowah and Athens. The heaviest rains fell during the first 35 hours (midnight May 5th through 11:00 P.M. May 6th), where 11.6 and 11.1 inches fell at Etowah and Athens, respectively. Storm total rainfall of greater than six inches fell somewhere in each county south of a Sevier to Morgan County line. In the Little Tennessee River and Hiwassee River basins, greater than nine inches fell during the entire event. All of this water drained into Watts Bar and Chickamauga Lakes, which eventually flowed down to Chattanooga.This ‘training’ of heavy rain fell over a relatively small area, all of which drained into the Tennessee River either slightly above or directly into the city of Chattanooga, TN. The heaviest rains fell across the Hiwassee River basin, which then drains into Chickamauga Lake. Both the Apalachia and Hiwassee Dams on the Hiwassee River in North Carolina were forced to spill water from the heavy rains across western North Carolina and northern Georgia. Also, the South Chickamauga Creek in Chattanooga (the headwaters of which lie in northwest Georgia) reached a record flood stage at the gage in East Ridge, TN. This gage lies well upstream of the creek’s confluence with the Tennessee River and is not affected by back water from the Tennessee River. However, the mouth of the creek is subject to backwater influences from the Tennessee River mainstem. Heavy rains across the South Chickamauga basin in northwest Georgia and portions of southeast Tennessee caused a new record flood stage on the South Chickamauga Creek of 29.32 feet on May 8th. The previous record stage was 28.72 feet observed in February 1990. "



The crack comes not from indifference, but from pressure and
stress of the memory. The knowing too much; the knowing too
little. Wanting to be there, in that room, of that hour, a part of
the-- god help me-- show. Because that's what it was. Your
worst fucking nightmare reality tv, only no camera, no retakes,
no editting. Well, aside from the not being there. You just have
to piece it all together with an imagination, if you got one.

So enter our subject, one 50 year old female, hooked on an insane
concoction of street and prescribed pills. Massive fucking amounts.
You don't think you can spend 5 thousand dollars on pills in 3 weeks?
Think again, fool. It's possible. And somewhere on that sunny
late May afternoon, there was a deranged resigned moment. When
the nagging fantasy of suicide became a blooming germ of will.
Maybe sometime after that last phone call, to one last friend. Some
time after the noon hour. Spring outside this prosaic dungeon is
in full swing. Low 80s are now commonplace. The floods of early
May 2003 are a memory now. Fronts less likely to stall. Basements
have all dried out. Summer is now accepted, like a virgin taking in her
man, her will to chastity finally broken by this determined lothario.
Families, like the Samsas, creep out of their drab dwellings to stretch
out their limbs in the sun. Good clean joy and I have no problem with
them. But then-- lest we forget--

Our hour has bloomed. Our music must be faced. Or not. Or did it all
begin with play? On the same level of exploration as child's play, only
with a darker, adult twist. First we pen the suicide letter, apologizing
to our families for our lies and our thefts. Express our love and our
thanks to the ones, the few, the very few, who stood by us during our
troubled times, our spouse's death, our parent's death. Then of course
we ask finally for God's forgiveness. As if the guilt comes from outside,
out beyond the Cosmic Microwave Background, quasars our throwtoys.
And ultimately this suicide-- all suicides?-- is a self-crucifixion to guilt.
The guilt of crimes real or interpreted. As Charles Manson says, "
reality is what the court says..." When it comes pinching down, with all
its god-emulating force, on lost souls that have never before felt the
creeping wormbreath of its umbra, whispering of cages and cold alligator
eyes-- you are overcome. You are binded permanently with darkness.
Suicide, like murder, is often your last resort to self-choice. The last
chance to affirm your identity in the universe. And ironically, in the
example of suicide, your chance to obliterate the identity at the same
time.

At this point, perhaps, it's still only a game. Did the moment of resig-
nation come before or after the note? And just how potent was that
moment? The guy who throws himself off a bridge doesnt know for
sure he's going through with it until the very instant of his plunging.
Perhaps. I've never arrived at that decisive moment.

Is it still play when you unpack the rusty pocketknives that mean
something now only to you. No one on the planet-- and assuming
no God, it's you alone in the entire fucking universe-- knows
they exist. They are your father's pocketknives. Small, loose-jointed,
rusty blades, you've kept all these years, since his death a little over
a year after your firstborn son. You were 17 and tears flowed insane
as you rummaged through his desk, every object thorned with emotions.
Father ripped out of you by the wolves of rain, the hyenas of sharp
curves, last ideal gone, left only with your self-interested, rather dumb
mother. Mother, lover of honky-tonks and creaky-jointed, beer-bloated
men.