BLOBBY'S BLOG

The Fog

The fog rolled in off the lake.

Actually it seemed to pummel. One would say it came from nowhere, but this isn’t intelligent design, there was a rationale for it all. It was so quick and all encompassing, ‘roll’ just seems so gentle – and yet it is that too.

Heavy fog is something you don’t see normally in this town. I can count on one hand how many times you’d see it from our house. It’s nothing I ever saw from my former 3^rd floor office a few miles from downtown.

But here on the 25^th floor, and two blocks from a Great Lake, it is quite eerie (though, maybe that should be Erie). The air being warmer than normal isn’t co-mingling with the coolness of the lake water, hence the fog. At least that is my perception. Who am I, Jim Cantore?

When the fog is this heavy, it’s like being blind. Maybe my senses are heightened, but the sirens I wrote about weeks ago seem to be more abundant today. I’m more aware of them. Maybe they aren’t, but the lack of being able to look down at the firehouse and seeing the hook and ladders racing down the street makes me notice them all the more. The wail is just continual. Or maybe there were just a plethora of accidents due to the lack of visibility.

I also hear the trains. Many many trains. Normally they don’t toot their horn (wow, that sounds gay), but I’m hearing them….and not seeing them. The trains that run through town are numerous and often I catch their movement from the corner of my eye during some of their runs.

When I see these locomotives and the cars they pull, I am always reminded of the time years ago, when we were in the process buying our first house. We were looking in Lakewood due to its gay-friendly nature and affordability. (I should say where we live is gay-friendly also, but has a higher per-capita of the lesbian population vs. Lakewood’s gay male influx). Anyhoo…train tracks ran right through any Lakewood neighborhood we could afford. Not near-by, but right through. And with the merger of CSX and some other entity, there were 49 (!!) different trains per day that would use the tracks.

I was fascinated by trains as a child, I mean, not as much as I was with planes. And Denton’s family worked the railroad (all the live long day), but this is not how I wanted to live.

The fog shrouds us most of the day, like a state of confusion. Every now and again, there are pockets of clear sky and lucidity.