Hurricane Harvey & the Blue Shed of Hope

He ejaculates tornadoes for breakfast; he taught Obama to surf

 

by Michael Pinchera 

As Emmy-award-winner and professional storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski shared the chaos and excitement of Hurricane Harvey’s Aug. 25 landfall on the Texas coast through his Periscope stream, memes were born.

The first meme saw Jeff immortalized as a super-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent god among men. Any exaggerated, smartass comment of strength that previously could be attributed to martial artist and mullet-headed ranger Chuck Norris was now an achievement of Jeff. (“Jeff pardoned the hurricane.”) All weekend long, no Periscope comment stream was spared the undying adoration of Jeff.. .it didn’t matter if the video was of rising flood waters narrated by a septuagenarian on a bicycle who was risking his life to share the tragic scenes in Houston or that of a Baltimore #cashmeoutside clone smoking a poorly rolled blunt and verbally assaulting her viewers. Jeff was everywhere. And Jeff is great, and I obviously spent too much time watching his stream as the disaster unfolded, but in those wet, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical transmissions I found meaning through an unexpected star.

With the hurricane’s eye wall getting closer, Jeff, along with some of his TwisterChasers.com crew found cover at Island Car Wash (2019 Highway 35 N, Rockport, Texas), a self-serve car wash (or “worsh” after the word escapes from Jeff’s Oklahoma-accented maw, all praise be onto Jeff) complete with a small, ancillary, tropical-blue out-building.

Camera facing forward through the car’s windshield, the square structure known as “ole blue” and then “blue shed” occupied the left side of the screen as rain and debris shuttled back and forth like white noise. #blueshed was born on Twitter at 7:17 p.m. via Logan Johnson — a hashtag that certainly first saw light moments earlier in the overly aroused Periscope commentary.

(“Everything is disintegrating!”). As the office buildings and strip mall businesses around Jeff met a twisted, violent end at 145 mph, #blueshed remained standing

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