Miss Ashley Pants

My first hurricane experience came after I moved to New Orleans.

I remember thinking two things: 1. This is magnificent (as I jogged down the trolley tracks of St. Charles against the violent shoving wall of wind, pelted by shards of rain, and seeing furling black clouds rolling toward me like oceanic waves of ebony gas) and 2. This is stupid! No, I don’t mean running in a hurricane is stupid. Well, it is, I guess. Probably. But what I’m talking about is the stupidity of the naming system. Why the people names? Do we anthropomorphize a malevolent natural force so we can feel like it’s somehow less of a humanity equalizer? (“Ah, yes. Katrina is the girl I slept with and never called back. I can totally handle this shit.”)

And why the gender switch ups?

Apparently I’m not the only one confused by that. The psychology behind chick titled hurricanes makes for double danger. People are less likely to shit their pants over a Anne of Green Gables than Alexander – who rides through the darkened cloud plumes on his cock tornado, wielding a lightning bolt, and sphincter fckking celestial nations until they flee like some grand act of meteorlogical manifest destiny. And you flee too, as he pillages your village, raping it with rain torrents of biblical proportions.

“That’s sexist.”

Hey, don’t look at me. I don’t make the subconscious rules. But when the field saw an influx of forecaster ladies back in the 70’s and they cried sexism, it actually served the greater good (even though that wasn’t their intent at the time). For a long while before that, there had only been lady names. So, Veronica Corningstone & Co. said something most femininists never say: “What this situation needs is a touch of man musk.”

And this little masculine identity injection saved lives, so they say. Which really just means that the Freudian phallic fear people have suddenly inspired them to don galoshes and go save themselves, I guess.

But my answer isn’t to do a total man moniker makeover. In fact, in my ideal world (which spins just yonder, in a parallel m-brane quantum world adjacent to our own), I’d just name all the hurricanes after strippers. This would be even better because no one respects “Candy”, “Cherry”, or “Peaches”. So no one would evacuate. And I’d be getting carpal tunnel from handing out Darwin Awards to people who never got the whole “A rose by any other name” thing. Evolution works far more quickly when we don’t cater to those unwilling to stop being ignorant.

But as we’re still here on earth and I know you all look to me as your dear leader for a kind and spiritual solution, I say we quit the alphabetical order thing and name them after sea creatures. Or car parts. Venereal diseases. David Lynch movies. Antique memes and trends. The foods listed on the aisle signs of Wegmans. Toy dog breeds. Solo songs Chris Cornell wrote after he left Audioslave.

And then we’ll see who’s really nervous about what.

“Hurricane AintNobodyGotTimeFuDat made landfall on the heels of Superstorm Kony2012 last night. It was the worst since last year’s Hurricane Hashtag GlutenFreePancakes and has flooded everything. And murdered everyone downtown. They are all now dead.

Back to you, Gayle!”