Flashback...

Flashback... a painful memory, an intensely vivid memory of a traumatic experience that returns repeatedly, an earlier event or scene, a scene or event from the past that appears in a narrative out of chronological order, to fill in information or explain something in the present, a drug aftereffect, the later experiencing of the effects of a hallucinogenic drug such as LSD long after discontinuing use of the drug…

Now that we know the definition of what a ‘flashback’ can be tonight I am going to discuss something that we all have experienced; some of you in not a too devastating form, some in traumatic horrendous nightmares that seem to never end with that memory and some perhaps like mine when we see it or hear about it or some other similar ruinous occurrence in your own life that it triggers whenever you see or hear it again and again with becoming physically ill.

Today was a painful day anyway with my neck and shoulders, numbies in my arms and legs and tummy acting up not too good today. And so I did try icing certain parts with of course ingesting the appropriate medications for such things but alas here I sit still not feeling that much better.

As most of you know we are survivors of a direct hit of Hurricane Charley 2004 that hit us while we were in our home and destroyed enough of it to cause over eighty thousand dollars worth of damage on our very tiny one thousand square foot home, in fact we had paid less for it than the amount of damage just six years before. To be fair it was a fixer upper and we had already done quite a bit to it at that point though, new windows, doors, floors, Gazebo, pond, garage etc. and it is waterfront that was our problem we are only five minutes from the harbor by boat, which was on its new lift.
The aftermath of seeing our neighborhood destroyed and the home right next door to us totally gone and still has never been rebuilt, gave us all in this area of Southwest Florida a nasty remembrance that nothing can erase. When Katrina hit a year later that triggered my ills once again and all this continuing of a miserable horror in our heartland just breaks my heart! Although, they had no warning at all and we had about four hours, still not enough to do anything significant; the terror comes to visit many of us when we see theirs.

For many of the ones that we were not directly hit by we were able to go and help them all prior to ours but we also had the ability to go home. But when Charley hit our home directly and so we could not go home since we were already there… and our home was pretty much gone. We did live in a trailer along side of our home while we rebuilt.

Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome happens in these situations too.
And as you watch the news, please just watch the survivors faces when they are interviewed and talk about what happened and you will see it in their lack of eye contact and inability to concentrate on the questions or like the one woman said almost mechanically it was surreal to her at that point and spoke with Brian Williams as if she was discussing someone else’s disaster not her own. All signs and symptoms of the survivors who look un-physically injured but do have those invisible deep injuries, many persons will tell them for years and years, “at least you’re alive.” True solace can come from those words, but the hauntings do not stop no matter what well meaning people say to some of us. Yes, some appear totally unaffected and amazingly I suppose they have gotten away clean without any lasting effects or maybe they are just in denial? Who knows? Whatever works to go on...?

What I just wanted to say was that with every world disaster or local ones, since the most recent ones have been in what we consider our own backyard, why even a large tornado is going through Okalahoma as I write this; it is sometimes more than any of us can endure!
I know it is not happening to me this time, but I feel their pain and that’s why I have been slightly neglectful in not discussing it here nightly.

Bizarre as it may seem, now I know I will probably lose some of you with my craziness but could this be the actual way that the ‘Rapture’, could be happening with these indiscriminate systematic pieces of natural disasters worldwide that California Preacher Harold Camping just got it wrong? His latest prediction is that we will all be ended on October 21, 2011, and that again he made a miscalculation in his math on his prediction for last Saturday.
Well, let’s all pray he is wrong again, and three strikes hopefully he will be out!
But you have to admit that Mother Nature sure has been misbehaving way too much lately, true?
SCARY AND HEARTBREAKING!

On that torturous realization let me be the first to end this with a little more positive note to remind you all to count those blessings and to share those overages and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, OK?