Hurricanes and Boss Fights.

I want to fight a hurricane.

I'm sitting down at a pre-hurricane party with my cousin when the thought hits me.

What is a pre-hurricane party?
Good question. it's not common, I don't think so at least. But I've been to a few. Unlike an earthquake or a tsunami, there's relatively a lot of heads up before a hurricane. After you've done the routine — stocking up on canned foods, buying batteries, storing water, battening up the windows, etc., there's not really a lot to do. A pre-hurricane party has no form; just a couple days before shit kicks off people get together to dance or drink or play dominoes or fuck. If you're a glass half-full person, then it's banking some good times because you might be stuck inside and isolated for a while. If you're a glass half-empty person then you can put that part together.

So many RPGs build up to you fighting god(s) or abstract concepts and I want to fight a hurricane. I don't know if I'd win but it'd be better than waiting around. Hurricane Melissa was late.

Another thing. We name hurricanes short, banal English names. One of the worst moments in Jamaica's history was when hurricane Gilbert blitzed the island in 1988. When the radio broadcasts and television addresses started dropping Gilbert as a comparison to the coming storm, you could feel a shift. Every one over 40 or so was activated. This wasn't rain that would blow over, this could kill. Gilbert hit before I was born but I heard the stories. You couldn't avoid them. It was the collective trauma of multiple generations of Jamaicans. Rivers overflowed and swallowed people, cattle, vehicles whole. Rooftops littered the streets and trees broken or bent into bizarre shapes, twisted from clenching the soil in violent wind. Depending on where you lived, it could take months for you life to begin to resemble normalcy.

Gilbert is not a good name for something to fight. Jenova has something to it. Sandy? Not so much. With Sephiroth you can feel the menace in the word itself? Maria? You went to school with a Maria. Sin however is pleasantly to the point. Sin's good. Stick a pin in Sin. We'll get back to that one.

With a name comes a gender. I still think it's weird how readily we'll give a storm a pronoun. With Melissa the jokes wrote themselves. Oh she late, gyal eva tek long fi get ready. She did really park outside the island for days grinding for a fight. A mass of 150 mile per hour wins moving at 2 miles per hour towards you. 150 turns to 160, then to 170, and then 185 mph. At 185 we're at race car speeds, wind turbines, freaky birds of prey. You're waiting for this to hit you and it's like you're trapped in a car and the car is stuck on a train track. You're there for hours, maybe days. You see the train coming in the distance. For some reason every station on the radio is telling you it's the heaviest train in the world. They let you know it's going to really hurt.

"Didn't you know a Melissa?" my cousin asked me on at the pre-hurricane party.
I did.
"Weren't you awful to her?"
I didn't answer him. I wasn't great, but I think I was short of awful; I entertained the joking insinuation privately if only for a second. Maybe the hurricane was karmic. We're a superstitious people at times. Port Royal sank into the sea because its people were wicked. In fact it was once called the wickedest city on earth, a 16^th century Sodom. To hear some Jamaicans talk about Haiti is to listen to collective xenophobia rationalising a series of unlucky breaks with respect to "natural" disasters and the routine exploitation by foreign powers — namely the US and Europe — as a punishment for wickedness. The wickedness? Hearsay about Haitians cultural practices obscured through uninterrogated xenophobic fuckery. I'm mad.

In Final Fantasy X there's a monster called Sin. It first presents as a hurricane (and a swarm of locusts) then as some cross between a tidal wave and a monster. Many think that Sin is a result of an out-group's fuck ups. I'm not going to get into the details of the plot of FFX. It's good and if I did it's not going to sound good. No RPG plot comes out of an article summary sounding enticing. There's too many nouns. FFX is the island Final Fantasy. It's the one where you do kind of (sort of) get to fight a hurricane. All the places are coastal. The main boy, and a very good one, looks like he's going to carnival. There's a focus on religion and prayer as a way for people to cope with disaster and to rebuild afterwards. Wakka, a less good boy, talks about how it's important to have distractions when disaster can strike at any point. He's talking about blitzball, but he would love a pre-hurricane party. At some point everyone learns that Sin was programmed to strike populated areas indiscriminately (I'm honestly done talking about the plot). Hurricanes are not karmic, they are tantrums. It's destructive blowback because the planet has terrible aim.

"The planet is dying Cloud," eco-terrorist and dad of the year Barrett explains. It's pained and earnest and almost there. Needs to read a little less like a New York Times headline. Try "they're killing the planet Cloud, they're killing us." I hate the word "natural" in natural disaster. It's a lie. Our oceans are hotter than ever before. Fuck the ice caps, I mean vapour. Melissa was the fourth Atlantic storm this year to undergo rapid intensification. In a day winds went from 70 mph to 140. So we're going to get more storms turning into hurricanes and more hurricanes hitting us in the coming years. As of 2021 Jamaica produced approximately 0.02% of global greenhouse emissions according to emmission-index.com. Cuba produced 0.06% and Haiti produced even less at less than 0.01 %. The US was second, 12.6% . China was first, 32.88%. A straight shot through us would have taken Melissa to the United States at full force. Instead, Melissa's path through the Caribbean was us, handbrake, turn, Cuba, Haiti, and then, at the time of writing, dissipating in the Bahamas. That's not karmic. There is sin here but it's not ours.

I'm not going to fight a hurricane. I'm not the protagonist. FFX's Sin tears through villages, it's a mass murdering weather system. The villagers pray and they rebuild but before that they bury and that's who I am. I will bury until I am to be buried. At best I'm an inciting incident. I'll be a call to adventure. I'll be a statistic on a power point slide, a red pixel on an arrow showing rising fatalities to make a point. When you say "natural" in natural disaster you either lie or belie a lack of spine and imagination. Your idiot mind has become so used to the pressure of greed and expansionism that you mistake it for gravity. I will die before you realise otherwise. You know who had imagination? Exxon. They had models too.

I think I want to be a hurricane. I'd be an ethical one. I promise. I'd rip private jets out of the sky with poise and precision. I'd hold in that rage going from sea to land. I'd be good. I'd wait until I was over who I needed to be over, who had it coming. Then I'd wail through the street tearing apart their buildings bit by bit. I'd cry and piss rain down their offices, into their homes. I would wash away their sin and everything else. I bet they could fight a hurricane. They'd find a way now that it would be them. They're killing the planet but they shouldn't die. That's what the games tell you at least. When a man becomes a hurricane he's gone too far. It's too direct. He's who has to be stopped.

Shilling/Chilling.

I’m never going to turn down money so if you wanna help me out with bills, repairs, etc. I would love that and kiss your face. Here you go. Thank you.

BUT all things considered I made it out of the worst storm in Jamaica’s history very intact. At the time of writing I have electricity, an internet connect, admittedly no running water, but a roof above my head. Most importantly I have life. Many of my countrymen are in dire straits and if you can give anything, please do. Thank you.