I have never not been awake for a local earthquake in my life. As a result:

- I feel the need to address the earthquake, on Twitter (for some reason) as well as to anyone in my house at the time. For some reason, I also want to make a call to tell people I have witnessed an earthquake. But no one is awake. Except you. And me.

- I feel both happy and disappointed that there is no evidence of the earthquake to prove that it happened. Usually nothing breaks, and this is good, because I like my stuff and value my life; however, there’s a sensation of wondering if it really occurred at all and whether it means anything (more earthquakes, earthquake “trends,” ability to predict earthquakes, why I am always awake for them, etc).

- Lately, these earthquakes have been of little consequence, sort of like the earth snoring. Again, good! But strange. If earthquakes happen every week, what’s the point of feeling the need to talk about them? This summer, they’ve been more frequent than, say, rain. Nobody Tweets in the middle of the night about rain. The closer the epicenter to where you happen to be at the time of the quake, the more it feels as though it must be significant. This one was in Beverly Hills, which reminds me of the story of a graveyard I used to drive past in rural Massachusetts: the rich people were buried on a hill and the poor people were buried down below, and a flood came and washed all the dead bodies of the rich people into dead pauper valley. It seemed as though Nathaniel Hawthorne had written that cemetery from beyond, and then came back to write another one about an earthquake in Beverly Hills. Except nothing broke. People just woke up and Tweeted.

- It is impossible not to consider the horrific consequences of a much larger earthquake and the weird frequency with which we are told that we are “overdue” for this event. It is like telling a very old person that they are “overdue” to croak. Sure, okay, but when? What do you do about that? Do these tiny earthquakes lessen the pressure between plates and somehow stretch the time between now and the overdate, or do they seem to be building and quivering toward a terrible culmination?

- I wind up thinking about Joan Didion and Tori Amos and Cher Horowitz.

- Not that I’m not usually thinking about them already. Minus Tori Amos.

- I stay up for an hour to make sure I don’t miss an important aftershock.

- Because if I went to bed, how could I be sure it really happened? And if the aftershock didn’t happen, wouldn’t I be less sure that the presentshock happened?

- I check the office that I don’t use to make sure nothing fell behind a thing.

- And then realize that it had probably fallen behind the thing during the last earthquake.

- I look to the sky for mass migrations of bats, birds, and large insects like on Survivor: Vanuatu.

- Then one has to consider the volcano: “Volcanism away from plate boundaries has also been explained as mantle plumes. These so-called “hotspots”, for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the core–mantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.”

- Suddenly, it feels very late.