Storm's a Comin'

Literally AND Metaphorically

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If you live anywhere from Texas to the Mid-Atlantic, you’re probably thinking about the big snow and ice storm they’ve been warning us about all week.

The image above shows areas of just ice accumulation, not snow. I’m smack in the middle of the red zone. They say that just half an inch of accumulated ice can add hundreds of pounds to individual power lines and tree branches, causing Hurricane-level damage and long term power outages, right as the Polar Vortex is driving nighttime temperatures well below freezing and daytime temperatures colder than is normally seasonable.

The big thing they’re warning about is multi-day power outages with sub-freezing temps. So I’ve done what I can to prep. My little apartment has no available storage space, so I chose to go light on supplies I’d have to find somewhere to put later if they don’t get used. I only have to heat a few hundred square feet, so I got a camp heater and a carbon monoxide detector to go with my propane camp stove for cooking. I have a Jackery power bank I was going to use for vanlife before that plan changed, so I should be good on keeping devices charged for several days. I’ve got water and canned food, and I think I’m good to go. I also bought an indoor-safe larger propane heater and some extra propane and brought it over to my family, since they weren’t doing any prep. They’ve got a pantry full of food and a gas range and more blankets than a Home Goods store, so I think they’ll be OK.

But prep has eaten up a lot of time this week, and then I came down with a man cold yesterday, so I didn’t get to finish writing the piece I’m working on yet — and I think it’s an important one. It’s about the other storm that I see coming right now, the metaphorical one, and it’s no less than the end of the world as we know it. I want to make sure I tell the story correctly, so I’m taking my time. I have no idea if I’ll have power all weekend or not. If I do, I should be able to make progress.

That said, part of this story will be told through video, but the hard drive where I stored my videos has been acting up lately, making working on video projects almost impossible. Surface level diagnostics said everything was fine, but last night everything on my PC kept freezing and crashing when I was trying to access certain folders, so I ran a deeper diagnostic and got the bad news that I’ve got unrecoverable sectors and the beginnings of mechanical failure on the drive.

This drive has the vast majority of my videos — including home movies of my family going back 20+ years — so I have to act fast to save everything I can. I had Amazon overnight me a new drive, because life just keeps reaching its hand out for more money, and in a little while I’m going to take the PC I’m using to write this apart and start working the salvage operation.

The upside is that if I succeed, not only will I have saved a bunch of priceless memories, I’ll finally solve a problem in my workflow that’s been giving me headaches for weeks now. I’ve been saving clips to help tell the story of what’s coming, and right now I can’t even access them at all.

So hopefully, if all goes well, and the storm causes fewer problems than they’re saying, and this man cold doesn’t put me in the ground, I’ll have that piece ready next week. I may have to break it into parts, but I won’t know that until I see how long it gets.

I think this is really important.

I was working on some life-figure-outing stuff with AI a couple days ago, and it had asked me some questions about OnePeterFive — how it came about, what the inspiration was, etc. That story is complex, but as a particular inflection point, I told it that I had had this vision in my mind of a storm coming that was going to sweep people away, and I felt I was being called to try to give them something to hold onto.

A while later, it called back to this point of information, and asked me, “What storm do you see gathering right now?”

And I realized there was one, and it’s huge, and I’ve been staring right at it. That’s when the idea for this piece clicked into place. Because the storm I see is a convergence, a nexus point, a confluence of intersecting lines of world events that is culminating right before our eyes, and it’s going to change everything in ways most people I talk to don’t grasp at all yet, and even the people who see the patterns can’t accurately predict.

All I know is that we’re going to be reading about 2026 in the history books as the year it all started to accelerate.

So it’s an exciting thing to work on — I say that relatively, because I don’t get very excited about much these days — because I know it’s important. Hopefully I can make it worth the wait.

Until then, I hope all of you who are in the path of this meteorological beast are able to ride out the storm in safety. I’ll see you next week.

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