Music Monday: The smell of hospitals in winter

Second jobs and time spent in waiting rooms have kept me away.

There was a hiking accident, then a three-and-a-half hour drive wondering if a loved one was OK and how bad she would be injured when I arrived.  (She was OK, mostly.  A kindly family of hiking Mennonites stopped to comfort her while waiting for emergency personnel.  A three-hour rescue operation followed, and yada yada yada, she'll be walking again in 8 to 12 weeks.)

There have been new and scary concerns about Nephew Bone.  Thankfully, an EEG and MRI -- two months apart -- were both deemed normal.  We have prayed for the best while fearing things unspoken.

Somewhere in the midst of it all was a stretch of seven days in a row spent in some hospital, doctor's office, ER, or other medical facility. I guess the worry and stress must have piled up on me, because I developed a cold sore for the first time in my life, then ran a fever for three days after.

There was a bit of good news, as I landed my first-ever paid writing gig.  It's nothing grand, but is exciting for me.  And it probably would have gotten its very own post but for everything else going on, so celebrating seemed out of place.

Oh, and if all that wasn't enough, I overflowed the toilet, flooded the bathroom, then came downstairs to find water pouring through the ceiling.  Long story short, if you ever come to my place and have a choice, don't sit in the recliner.

I have a confession.  It's really hard for me to focus on anything else right now because... herpes!  I have herpes!  And according to something I googled, it could have been lying dormant inside my body for years without me knowing!  With my swingin' lifestyle, I could have infected as many as five, yea, six girls over the past decade.  How can I live with myself?!?!

Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- I could find no songs about herpes to feature on this week's Music Monday.  So instead, I have called upon an old friend.  (No, not Tone Loc, though that would have been super cool.  And how did you even know he and I were homies?)

I first heard Nate Ruess when he was lead singer of The Format.  For a while, their "She Doesn't Get It" held the coveted title of most played song on my iTunes.  After they broke up, I figured I'd never hear from him again.  Like an ex-girlfriend you long for wistfully who says she wants to stay friends but never answers her phone when you call.... as an example, I mean.

And then...

One glorious day two or three years later, I heard that unmistakable voice again.  "That sounds like the guy from The Format," I thought.  And it was.

He'd started a new band called Fun.  It was good to know that he had moved on and I.... well, he had moved on.

The Format never really became a huge mainstream band, so it's been kinda cool to see Ruess enjoy much success with Fun, even as my own success has remained almost eerily unchanged.

I like this acoustic version of "Carry On."



I would like to dedicate this song to all of us afflicted with herpes, the silent killer....... what?  What is carbon monoxide......

Oh my God!  I may never fall asleep again!

"The smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls..."

Kids, it's not that difficult

As my blog has evolved, I have gone from posting at near Twitter-speed anytime a thought wafted through my mind, to posting a day or two after an event happened, and now to this.  "This" being some sort of massive blog slowdown wherein I am just now getting around to blogging about Nephew Bone's birthday party.  Which took place in August.  Of 2012.

OK, 2013.  But still.

Is evolved the right word?

Devolved?  Decomposed?

Nephew Bone turned five this year.  Ah, five...  I don't actually remember much about being five.  I think that may have been the year I got my Starsky & Hutch matchbox car.  Nephew Bone had a Duck Dynasty party.

Boy, this post really isn't going anywhere.  I think I will instead make this a general info post on how to throw a proper birthday party for a child under seven.  Yes, that's what I shall do.  I decided that just now, on the fly.

Bone: Making virtually every life decision on the fly since 1980-something.  This explains oh so much.

I know what you're thinking: Bone, you don't even have any kids that we know of.  How would you know anything about throwing a birthday party for one?

Exhibit A: I, Bone, have attended somewhere around EIGHT of these little germ fests over the past five years, so... yeah.

Exhibit B: One of my sister's favorite sayings is "I can't wait 'til you have kids."  I can only take this to mean she knows what an excellent rearer of children I will be and she is anxiously awaiting it, probably in much the same way Houdini's sister anxiously awaited his escape the first time she buried him alive.

(I also wrote a post several years ago wherein I may have poked a little fun at the time-out method of discipline and a couple of people took it to mean I was advocating spanking children.  Yeah, that cost me about half my readers at that time, so I no longer include it on my parenting resume.  I was even reprimanded by the World Order of Mommy Bloggers, aka WOMB.  Ironically, my punishment wound up being, you guessed it, a 15-minute time-out.  Oh well, live and learn.  Or, in my case, just live.  Not all of this paragraph is factual, but probably more than you think.)

Now that we've established my credentials, let's get this party started... in a manner of speaking.

The first thing you're gonna want to do is minimize the number of kids you invite to this party.  This is because of Bone's Theorem of Kids and Fun, which states:  The number of kids at the party is inversely proportional to the amount of fun your child's "adult" friends will have at said party.  And really, what's more important than that?

Chances are your child isn't going to remember this party anyway.  I mean, how many of your birthday parties before the age of seven do you remember?  And besides, are these really your child's friends?  Or are they, more likely, children of your friends whom you have forced upon your child in some sort of medieval-esque arranged friendship.  Hmm?

Mmhmm, stepping on some toes now, am I?

Now personally, I prefer a 1:1 child-to-parent ratio.  I wouldn't go any higher than 2:1.  If someone shows up with more than two kids, I recommend scolding their child in front of them.  It has been my experience that they will leave fairly soon after that.

The second ingredient for a successful children's party is renting one of those cool, inflatable water slides.  Nephew Bone had one of these at his party.  Actually, he's had an inflatable slide at two of his parties, and those were two of the funnest days of my admittedly not-all-that-exciting life.

Going down an inflatable water slide at 40-years-old dressed as Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty... I'm just not sure where else my life has to go after that.

Now, there is one danger of which you should be aware with these inflatable slides.  Inevitably, one of the smaller kids winds up getting hurt by one of the bigger kids and starts crying.  This also happened at Nephew Bone's party.  And no, the "bigger kid" in this instance wasn't me, thankyouverymuch.

Although I did make two kids cry on the trampoline.

But it's not my fault!  I have to do my high jumps!  It's family tradition.

And that's it.  Two simple steps to hosting a successful kids birthday party, from a guy who's never even hosted one. 

If I could proffer one final piece of advice, it would be this:  No one's perfect.  Actually, that's not really advice, is it?

Hmph.  Let's try something else.

Kids are a crapshoot.  We're all gonna make mistakes.  (Well, you're gonna make mistakes. As stated earlier I've not had kids yet, so...)  They're resilient.  They'll adjust.

And if they question you, respond as my Dad always did to me: "Because I said so."  (Bonus side note:  This works OK with kids.  Not as well with girls you may be dating.)

Besides, your kids have most likely figured out by now that you control the flow of Goldfish and juice in the household.  And once that pecking order has been established, what could go possibly go wrong?  And if they're still getting on your nerves, just send them up to bed early.  Problem solved.

Wow, if I already have this much knowledge about kids, once I get a couple years of actual experience, I'm gonna be a scary good parent.

No wonder my sister can't wait.

"Do you think for one minute that this is it / Your party is bogus, yo, it ain't legit / You better put on the Hammer and you will be rewarded / My beat is ever boomin' and you know I get it started..."

Music Monday: This time of year

It comes at first in bits and pieces.  Hinting at itself with a single crisp morning, only to be swallowed up by the heat of a midday Sun.  Then a week later, perhaps two, you get an entire day of it, the oppressive humidity removed and replaced by a feeling so familiar yet not fully describable, so that it can only be called "fall."

September seems to arrive on a gentle breeze.  At first it's just a breeze, stirring the still warm air.  But after some days, it begins to turn and to chill.  Soon here the cotton will be dried and full, ready for picking.  Then the leaves begin their spectacular but all-too-brief magic show, as the sun begins to set on the year.

For me, fall will always be a Friday afternoon in 1989.   It's high school, and a pep rally.  The students have long since mailed it in for the week, and most of the teachers have done the same.  It's intentionally accidentally bumping into the girl I've wanted to ask out since the first day of Physics after school, then not quite getting up the courage to.  But still smiling because I got to talk to her.  And besides, there would always be next week.

It's those few perfect days where no heat and no AC are needed.  It's driving with the windows down and singing at the top of my lungs to my "Unchained Melody" cassette single because Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield knew just how I felt.

Fall is a reminder -- of itself, of other falls gone before, and of so many other things you hadn't even planned on remembering.  But damn that breeze and all it conjures up...

Taking advantage of the change in weather, we ventured down to the Clarkson Covered Bridge Sunday afternoon.  I have included some iPhone photos for your ocular delight.  The scenery is God's (and the Alabama Historical Commission's).  The captions are mine.

As covered bridges go, she seemed like a long one.

Historical markers: The original Wikipedia

"I don't ever wanna feeeeeel, like I did that day.  Take me to the place I looooove..."

I like to call this one "Tree on Side of Hill, Hashtag Nature."

I did everything I could to save this dog, but as it turns out he actually was not dead in the first place.

And it being Monday and all, I know it's a little out-of-character for me to do a Music Monday.  But what the heck.  I haven't blogged in a month.  May as well throw everything I've got out there at once.

I had a couple of songs in mind.  One was "This Time of Year" by Better Than Ezra, but it's really hard to find decent live versions of songs and I couldn't find an official video for that one.  The other song isn't anything all that remarkable.  But it was written by a guy from my home county, and a couple of the people mentioned in the song are real people who do or did exist, and I'm pretty sure the gin is still there.  So in that sense, I guess it is pretty cool.  It's called "Sweet Southern Comfort."  And again for lack of a decent live version, this is the video for the song.  Try and ignore the cheesy phone call bit at the start. 



"Well, there's a feeling in the air / Just like a Friday afternoon / Yeah, you can go there if you want / Though it fades too soon..."

Man perplexed by friends' lack of Zynga games activity

(Source: FakeOnion.com)

Mr. Cy Berstocker thinks he has uncovered something quite alarming about the world in which we live.  After suffering through a two-hour-plus period of a workday during which none of his friends played a single move in Words With Friends, the Alabama man began to wonder what was happening.

"I've got forty-seven games of Words With Friends currently in progress," Berstocker confessed as he showed off his sparkling career 25.1 points-per-word average.  "Now, I could see twelve or fifteen of these people having plans or just getting sick of playing, and losing.  Maybe even twenty or thirty.  But every single one?  It didn't seem likely."

That's when Berstocker began reading the premillennial book series, Left Behind.

"I'd always heard of the rapture, and I figured this might be it.  I remember those books being out so I picked one up and started reading.  Well, I probably don't have to tell you, it was pretty boring.  So I only got to page four.  That's when I decided something even more disturbing might be going on."

His hypothesis?  People at work, were actually working!

"I know it seems unlikely, but that's all I can come up with.  Look at this.  Normally, by this time of day my battery power is down to twenty or thirty percent.  Today?  Seventy-eight percent.  Meanwhile, I've been nudging people left and right, like an extroverted goat.  It's like a Twilight Zone where the protagonist wakes up and goes to work.  He's still goofing off, but suddenly everyone else is doing actual work.  It's freaking me out, man."

For now, Berstocker mostly sits and stares at his iPhone, pondering things like whether he has enough chip clips for all his potato chips, and maybe someday interacting with another human face-to-face.

Pulling down and releasing the screen every few seconds to refresh.

Hoping, praying, for any sign of life.

"Now I'm looking to the sky to save me / Looking for a sign of life / Looking for something to help me burn out bright..."

Forty is the new seventy

Two weekends.  Two lakes.  Two very different outcomes.

The first, I was leaping from rocks, flying through the air with the grace of a young Greg Louganis, the first time his mother threw him into the pool and told him to swim or die.  (What?  It obviously worked out OK.) 

The second was much more sinister, much more sobering.  It is the second I want to focus on today.

I had just woken up from my second nap of the day.  It was a hard nap, where you wake up feeling like someone must have walloped you in the face with an iron skillet.  So I was admittedly a bit groggy as I made my way down the pier to the mini-catamaran of which I've become so fond.

There is a 3-to-4-foot step from the edge of the pier to the watercraft.  I've made it several times with no problem.  But on this day, something went horribly wrong.

A misstep, or a slip, or maybe someone pulled the watercraft slightly away at the last second.  We may never know for certain.  But in an instant, I was in the water.

My life flashed.  This couldn't be the real end, could it?  I mean, I had so much left to do.  I still haven't gotten to experience my full-on mid-life crisis!  That was undoubtedly going to spawn some killer blog entries, not to mention some great prescription meds! 

Clinging to the edge of the vessel for dear life, I began to take inventory of my faculties.  Silently, I cursed myself for so foolishly throwing away all those Scooter Store mail-outs.

So many questions ran through my head. Who would take care of me?  Could I still play Words With Friends?   What was my last Facebook status?  The latter is important because whenever someone dies tragically the news story always includes the line, "He had just posted on Facebook two days ago.... blah blah blah."

(If you're curious, my last Facebook status would have been: "Had a conversation with the neighbor earlier this evening about gout.  I think I may need to scale back.  My life is getting a little too exciting."  OK, so that actually works quite well as a final post.)

Oh, and was I injured?  Yes, yes, there was definite pain emanating from my left hand.  I looked at my hand, one of only two that I have, and there I saw it:  blood.

I could have drowned!  Thankfully, I had already strapped on my life vest.  Also, the water was about four feet deep.  But still, according to the internet it only takes two inches of water to drown a person, so... I could have drowned!  Or worse.

Becoming more aware of my surroundings, I began to hear cries of "Bone!  Bone!  Are you OK???"

I pondered my next move.

Should I boost myself up onto the pier, get up and pretend everything is fine?  Um hello?  Do you think you're watching some movie right now?   I'm not Rambo, or the Bionic Guy.  Also, did I mention I was bleeding???

Plus, if I hop right up it becomes a funny story, with everybody laughing at Bone.  Been there, done that.  If I'm injured, it becomes a sad story.  All I wanted was three or four days of pity, to be waited on hand and foot, and to be regarded by some as a hero.  Is that too much to ask?

Summoning strength uncommon for a person in my situation (and age), I crawled up on the pier and laid on my back, as someone who had just been saved from drowning might be expected to do.  Then waited for someone to come administer first aid.

My feet were hurting.  More specifically, my big toes.  They must have taken the brunt of the force from my one hundred and ninety-, er, eighty-five pounds.

They would wind up purple and blue.  And I'm pretty sure my left big toe is broken.  I must have really banged myself up on the underpinnings of the pier because at one point, I was bleeding out of five different portals of my body.  But those bruises are nothing compared to the deep-tissue contusion suffered by my pride.  For that, my friends, like so many of my emotional scars, will never heal.

How did this happen to me???  I'm Bone!  I once scored 26 points in a church league basketball game!  I keep telling myself 39-year-old me never would have fallen.  But 40-year-old me.... well, apparently he needs to get together a rudimentary last will and testament.

As you might expect, I look at life a little differently these days.  You young whippersnappers who want to go the speed limit, you go right ahead.  I'll be in my over-sized (read: safe) vehicle, cruising into the September of my life at no faster than 35 miles per hour.  In the left-hand lane.  With a perpetual turn signal on.

When you see me, I likely will have just come from the Walgreens where I purchased some hand-grips and no-slip shower mats for the bathroom.

At my age, you can't be too careful.

"People my age / Are showing some wear / There's holes where their teeth was / And their heads have gone bare / Their brains are shrinking / Faces sinking into fat / And as for the mirror / We won't be looking into that..."

Music Monday: Blowing by

Time is always moving at light-speed, and few have lamented its swiftness as often as I.  But this summer has been especially quick.

I feel like I got to this summer movie an hour late.  I'm sitting here ready for it to begin, yet the calendar says intermission has already passed.  Oh well, maybe at least I'll be there for the climax.  Or more likely, as the September credits start to roll and everyone else is making their way out into the lobby discussing their favorite parts, I'll be sitting there wondering what just happened.  (And leaves are falling, in the lobby!  Because the lobby represents autumn.  Am I the only one getting confused by this film/seasons analogy?)

And yet, bygone years have taught me that the next one may be even more fleeting.  So lest I while away the last precious moments of this summer bemoaning its brevity, I should get in gear and see if I can't somehow figure out this plot.

I'd like to squeeze in a trip to Cincinnati yet this season to see the Reds.  And at some point a date needs to be nailed down for a white water rafting trip for which tickets have already been purchased.  But August is my busy time, what with the toddler birthday party circuit coming up and all.  And of course, all this has to be done before September, because that's college football season.  And that's a movie I never miss.

We did manage to fit in a canoe trip over the 4th of July weekend.  I always look forward to being in a place with no cell service.  It's nice to be off the grid for awhile.  That feeling lasts about three hours.  Then I'm looking to trade my soul for someone's WiFi password.

The canoe trip is ordinarily a most relaxing excursion.  The river virtually empty.  If you encounter 4 or 5 other canoes, that's about average.  But this year, there must have been a boom in the local water recreation industry.

There were at least 3 or 4 different canoe companies that had started up since the last time I was there, and they were all taking busloads of people back and forth.  My once quiet getaway now provided about as much peace and seclusion as an amusement park.

The river was an almost non-stop cluster of canoes and 10-year-old kids in kayaks.  It was my worst nightmare.  (Except in my nightmare I whack the kids in the head with my canoe paddle and they instantaneously regenerate into even more annoying versions of themselves.)

However, this was a nice twenty seconds:

Unfortunately, views like that were far between and way too few.  I think I'm beginning to understand the allure of becoming an astronaut.  It's the only way to get away from people anymore.  In fact, is that mission to Mars still on?  Seven-person crew.  55 million square miles.  I think I can handle that.  Can we go ahead and put internet there?  And a golf course.

I also found time to discover some new music recently, downloading the new album from Jason Isbell.  He's originally from Alabama.  And as with many local things, I'm not sure I have a good grasp on how widespread or popular he is.  But he was on Letterman, so... more popular than me, but probably not as popular as, say, the Beatles or Richard Marx.  Somewhere in between.

Anyway, it being Tuesday and all, I figured it was time for a Music Monday post.  The album is titled Southeastern.  The songwriting is splendid.  And this particular song has been stuck in my head for most of the past week.



"I had to summon the confidence needed to hear her goodbye / And another brief chapter without any answers blew by..."

Debbie does delusion

I have a friend.  I know, shocking.  We'll call her Debbie.  (She once wore a bonnet and bore a striking likeness to the snack cake empress, so we started calling her "Little Debbie.")

Some years ago, Debbie, her boyfriend, a couple other friends and I went to the Mardi Gras.  It was 1990-something.  We were young.  We had no idea what was in store....  OK, so I suppose we had some idea.

We would stay in Mobile, whose Mardi Gras celebrations, I learned, actually pre-date those in New Orleans by several years.  We'd check out the parades in Mobile one day, and drive over to check out the scene in New Orleans another day.

But this is not a Mardi Gras story, per se.  It's more of a Little Debbie story -- the friend, not the snack cake.  (Though I could discuss Nutty Bars, Oatmeal Creme Pies, and Banana Twins at length.)  It's  a story I had forgotten about until I was talking about imaginary friends with someone last week.  No, not my therapist.  Well, not paid therapist anyway.

Debbie is a sweet, sweet person, passive and a bit soft-spoken, which I suppose left her open to our, at times, incessant kidding.  She was always talking about these girls -- friends of hers -- that we never saw.  So at some point it became sort of a running joke amongst our little group of friends that these girls didn't actually exist and Debbie was just making them up.

Yes, long before Manti Te'o, there was Debbie. 

It was in Mobile that the whole imaginary friends thing sort of came to a head. 

One of Debbie's "friends" from college lived in Mobile.  We'll call her "Alison."  Debbie was to call Alison when we got in town and we'd meet up at some point.  "Sure we will, Debbie.  Whatever you say."

On the drive down, that's all we heard.  Then once we arrived, we weren't allowed to make any other plans until we found out when Alison wanted to hang out.  At long last, we were going to meet one of Debbie's friends.

She called Alison one afternoon to supposedly set up the rendezvous.  I want to say one of us grabbed the phone to see if there was actually a real, live person on the other end, but my memory fails me at this point so I can't be sure.

When Debbie got off the phone, we asked when and where we were supposed to meet her "friend."

"She says she'll just meet us downtown tonight."

In case you've forgotten, it's Mardi Gras.  There are several THOUSAND people downtown.  Tens of thousands.  And we're just supposed to bump into this girl "downtown???"

Needless to say, we never ran into her.  And as you might imagine, the teasing grew evermore incessant.

That was back in the days when we were all broke and limber enough to fit 6 or 7 people in one hotel room/two beds.  (Well, I'm still broke, but no longer quite so limber.)  To Debbie's credit, she did not require us to leave a space in bed for her imaginary friend.

Or make me give her any of my beads for flashing her imaginary boobs.

"When you're alone / And life is making you lonely / You can always go / Downtown..."

Jumping the Sharknado

When I first heard about the Sharknado, I'll be honest, I thought it was real.  In my mind, I pictured a series of angry shark attacks in a limited geographical area.  Sort of a Bermuda Triangle meets the killer bees meets Jaws.  With all the freaky stuff going on in the world today, I figured, "Why not?"

Then I found out it was a movie.  And a sci-fi movie, at that.  And suddenly I had lost what little interest I ever had.

I was on Twitter Thursday night when the Sharknado began.  At least three out of every four tweets on my feed were Sharknado-related.  As is often the case when seemingly everyone jumps on the bandwagon of anything, I become even more averse to that thing.

I briefly considered unfollowing everyone who tweeted anything about Sharknado.  "That'll show 'em," I thought to myself, suddenly feeling like someone you'd most often find living in their parents' basement.  But as that would have left me only following about eight people, I decided to pass.

And then...

Someone made the mistake of tweeting something about Ian Ziering being in the movie.

And that's all it took for me to be sucked into the Sharknado.

Yes, while many guys may have been watching to see Tara Reid, I was not among them.  I was watching for the actor who once played the affable Steve Sanders on Beverly Hills 90210.

You see, I have an obligation to watch any and everything featuring any former cast member of the original 90210.  (Except for Andrea. Blech!)  Why else would I have watched even the fifteen minutes I did of Tori & Dean: Inn Love?  Exactly.  There is no other acceptable reason.

For the few of you who may still be reading, er, wondering what Sharknado is, I quote from the ultimate source of all internet knowledge, Wikipedia: "Sharknado is a 2013 made-for-television disaster film about a tornado that lifts sharks out of the ocean and deposits them in Los Angeles."

Sort of a City of Angels meets Jaws meets Twister.

However, Sharknado was much more than just a movie.  It was, simply put, a Twitter phenomenon.  Soon I found myself making sarcastic comments about the movie with people I'd never met.  For two hours, that's all we did.  Even a few members of the Twitterati were chiming in.  It was such an in-the-moment, true-life experience... in a virtual setting, obviously.

In fact, I do hereby declare that from now to forever, all subsequent Twitter phenomena in which more than half of all Tweets in the world at any given moment are about the same topic also be referred to as a "Sharknado."

Some examples: "Boy, Twitter really sharknadoed last night."  "That UFO landing caused Twitter to Sharknado last night."  (Note: There hasn't really been a UFO landing. At least, not that the government will admit.)

For your confusion, I will be using the term "Sharknado" to refer to both the movie and the Twitter phenomena.

The fact that 1.4 million people watched Sharknado probably says more about the lack of halfway-decent summertime TV options than anything else.  Because it was bad.  We're talking  USA-Up-All-Night bad.  But the thing is, it was so bad, it was hilarious.  I would estimate SyFy spent upwards of five, six thousand dollars on the 1960's-era special effects.

What could have made it better?  I have two words for you: Brandon Walsh.  Well, any additional original 90210 characters really.  You telling me "Sure, Donna Martin graduated, but can she survive... the Sharknado?!?!" wouldn't have made a killer tag line?

But I'll take what I can get.  It was nice to see Ian Ziering not be typecast for once.  In Sharknado, his character is a California surfer and bar owner. As opposed to 90210, where his character was a California frat boy and club manager.  (I think we all remember the Peach Pit After Dark.)  So, very different.

I also have a few suggestions for future SyFy movies that I would like to see:  Dogcano.  Snakequake.  The scarier-than-you-might-think Hurricrane.  And the catch-all Zoonami.  And by "I would like to see," I mean, "I can't promise that I'll be watching."

One wonders what might possess SyFy to make such a bad movie in the first place?  Well, if nothing else, it keeps actors like Ian Ziering gainfully employed, so that they don't have to resort to a career in the porn industry.  I mean, even I don't want to see that.  Well, maybe.......  No, definitely not.

In closing, I'm sure this post has raised several questions in your mind, about me, about the world we live in... but mostly about me.  And I'm sure some of you are also wondering, could a Sharknado ever really happen?

Well, if you're referring to the tornado/shark natural disaster portrayed in the movie, my answer would be: I don't really know.  I'm not sure I understand all the science and meteorology behind it.

But if you're referring to the Twitter phenomenon which will now and forevermore be known as a Sharknado, my answer would be:  It already has.

"And I've given up hope on the afternoon soaps and a bottle of cold brew / Is it any wonder I'm not crazy? / Is it any wonder I'm sane at all?"