If you live in LA you have to make a choice about how you feel about earthquakes and you have to live with that choice. You can ignore them, you can fear them, you can stalk them, but the choice brews beneath every step you take to your car, which is probably still where you parked it. If anxiety is fear plus the unknown, then it makes perfect sense that lately my brain, which often craves high stakes and good Oscar worthy cinematography for her Worry, has been knitting fear over the Big One: The terrifying, land altering giant earthquake that’s apparently just asleep below all of Los Angeles right now, a dragon that I can keep at bay with my thoughts (NOT TECHNICALLY HOW DRAGONS OR EARTHQUAKES WORK.) I get in bed. I pray for Joe. I close my eyes and wonder if it’ll be tonight. Or now. Or now. Or now? If bad things come when you least expect them, can you stop the thing by Expecting it? Obviously not. And I’m in the middle of a very smart podcast right now about how worry is a compulsive behavior, and addiction that can be stopped, so more so once I’ve finished it and basically solved Myself, but for now: I think I need one of the above Earthquake Simulators parked inside of my house. Or could I turn my shower into one? Maybe what I need is a good shaking every night before bed, and every morning when I wake up, to remove the mystery. Maybe I just need a million tiny earthquakes, spread evenly over the bread of my life, up to each four corners, maybe I am already, in a way I can’t even tell, always shaking.