Approaching the Event Horizon

Inside a spinning vortex of trash.

Two days ago, a tornado ruined several houses only five minutes from where I live. It is a small Central European town, at the edge of the Adriatic Sea, surrounded by hills and forests. Not a typical tornado site, I’d reckon, but here we are. Today, at the time of writing, catastrophic floods are ruining the rest of the country.

During the last five years, we’ve come to a point where we can reasonably ask ourselves not whether or not a disaster will strike at all, but which one will be this week. Not just globally, but locally — this is the frequency right now — one per week.

Several houses devastated by a small tornado. Photo by author.

Moreover, just a week before that, I was in Nice (France), where I experienced the worst heatwave (or canicule, as the French call it) of this summer. I was placed in a student dorm room with no air-conditioning, and the first night I got to find out how the wet-bulb temperature feels like. It is no joke.

It felt like sleeping on a barbecue grill, to say the least. I could hardly breathe, sweating like crazy, and everything that came in touch with my body was soaking wet. For the first time in my life, I was afraid to experience a heat stroke. Images from “The Ministry for the Future (Chapter 1)” were flashing before my eyes and I wondered if this is how it feels like to be dying from…