Apocalypse dreams

I dreamt last night that it was the day after Milton had passed east over the land, and pictures were coming out from Tampa Bay. A series of images, brown mudflats with chunks of asphalt and the very ends of tree trunks or were they telephone poles poking up out of the mud, huge swathes of grey brown sludge atop which lounged almost uncountable alligators, forlorn and out of place, plopped down and left behind flotsam of the waters.

"Ybor City, downtown and the Convention Center are completely gone, " reads the text, "but North Tampa is surprisingly ok" it makes no sense geographically but I don't notice that what I notice is that even in my dreams I'm reading posts, even if I'm also embodied looking at the scene even if I'm seeing with my own eyes I'm only ever seeing posts.

My brain is doing triage, protecting my friends while taking out Ybor City and the Convention Center, the destruction of a gentrifying neighborhood at least as I understand it from my very limited very ignorant maybe two weeks total spread across three visits but still I wake up so scared. And I look at the news and see that Orlando is facing up to 12 inches of rainfall and I imagine the living room of two newish friends heartbreakingly kind and welcoming queers who make beautiful angry music and spend all their time doing mutual aid and labor organizing and fighting for the unhoused and with sudden dread I remember how beautiful the sunset looked over one of Orlando's lakes from the lawn in front of their house.

And I remember the text I got in response to my check in with another friend in Orlando, they're gonna hunker down they've done everything they can and now they're gonna work on making stuff for their distro so if they get through this storm they'll have loads of supplies to hand out because they don't have a working car and how could they evacuate?

I look at my phone and overnight notifications but those three aren't there so I flick through I send some organizing texts there are always organizing texts to send and I'm getting in the habit of responding to texts immediately whenever I open the phone not putting things off because it distracts me it gives me something else to do. Getting totally activated by the climate apocalypse and ever widening genocide isn't a doctor recommended cure for ADHD procrastination but the last few weeks it's been helping.