As I write this, my neck of the woods (upstate New York, an hour north of Albany) has about 36 hours to go before Hurricane Irene arrives. The latest word from weather experts on the radio is that when she gets here, she’ll likely be a Category 2 storm carrying 80-100 mile an hour winds. I’ve told the kids to keep our outdoor cat indoors, because I would hate to see him carried to the heavens, like Enoch. I just know it wouldn’t end as well for Ralphie as it did for Enoch.

I’ve been thinking for the last 12 hours or so about writing some sort of profound rumination on current and near-future events, but I find nothing is coming to mind. I guess it’s because the storm could hit us, or it might go out to see, and the quantum uncertainty seems to have me frozen in place. Although I did stock up on extra Charmin. It’s not like we won’t find a use for it even if Irene passes us by entirely. After all, Halloween is coming.

I do find myself looking around at all our stuff and wondering if it’ll still be here Monday. Outside, there’s a glorious blue sky putting the lie to the idea that anything untoward — not to say catastrophic — might be slowly making its way toward us. So I see my comics and my action figures and my wife and my kids and I can’t wrap my brain around the idea that this storm could wash it all away and drown us in a whirling sea of shit and piss and rain and other people’s stuff very shortly. The shed on the side of the house? That’s not in the best shape, and I know if we even get 50 mile an hour winds, it’ll likely be in Maine within an hour or two of the storm’s arrival. Maybe pieces of it will make it to Nova Scotia, prominently mentioned now in storm coverage, and coincidentally where my mother’s mother was born, around the same time Jack the Ripper was busy making headlines.

It’s funny to mention “storm coverage.” I mocked Albany’s news/talk radio station earlier this week for making much ado about virtually nothing in regard to the Virginia-based earthquake that rattled some buildings up this way and was felt by some (but not by me). But I imagine that station has made plans to have news people available to go live in case the worst happens (and likely even if it doesn’t). Sadly, closer to home, we have eight radio stations in Glens Falls and the chances of any quality news coverage airing on them over the weekend is virtually zero. I’d wager most of them won’t even have a live body in the building throughout the worst of the storm. Having spent over a decade doing radio news, I even whimsically imagined myself offering my services up gratis just to make sure people got information, but it’s more than likely they’d turn down my offer, thinking their canned music and weather forecasts recorded two or three days ahead of time will serve the public interest, which after all is why the FCC licenses radio stations in the first place. Hell, the neglect of broadcast ethics and standards circa 2011 C.E. means most local stations probably couldn’t go live and take phone calls without hours of work by an engineer who actually knows what he or she is doing, anyway. If you think there’s anyone left who cares, think again.

So, that’s as profound as I’m going to get, staring down the barrel of this particular gun. I’ve stocked up on toilet paper, I’m pretty sure our shed is going to be washed away, and I’m angry beyond words that there’s no local broadcast infrastructure in place to take care of the people of the community I live in.

If you’re in Irene’s path, I wish you every possible bit of good luck. This could all amount to nothing, although with one meteorologist saying the storm could be “worse than Katrina,” I really have a feeling it will probably amount to a bit more than nothing. Good luck to us all, though.