>>16250
I get what you mean. I remember having to go in the basement as a kid during tornado warnings and getting nervous. Earlier this year I took a trip with my family near that area that just habbened to have been hit by a tornado not that long before we went through and saw damage and people cleaning up after it. What really sent me down the rabbit hole was lurking Twitter and seeing a post from someone talking about how creeped out they get by tornadoes. They had an image of the infamous Jarrell, Texas “Dead Man Walking” photo accompanying the post.
Seeing The Wizard of Oz as a kid might have something to do with my interest too. I associate tornadoes in my head with 19th- and early-20th-century Americana like that, which is something that interests me. I remember first learning about Henry Darger and how on top of writing his most well-known work of over 15,000 pages and making hundreds of pieces of visual art, he ended up writing an autobiography for a few hundred pages that then veers off into several thousand pages about an account of a fictional tornado. Something about the insanity of that stuck with me. Especially considering that he was a guy who was born in 1892, ran away from an orphan asylum as a kid, and supposedly saw a tornado himself around that time. His life story to me is like an eerie intersection of old-timey bleakness and an Oz-like fantasy world being used as a coping mechanism. It’s almost like a modern autist being born into a Wisconsin Death Trip setting.
Anyway, I think maybe I should be easing up on this stuff. I’m more nervous about tornadoes now than I was before I learned a little bit more about them. The rain-wrapped nighttime tornadoes of Dixie Alley I find especially horrifying. Same for the Clem Schultz footage. I don’t want to end this post on a depressing note, though. I’d still kind of be interested in seeing a tornado funnel in real life if it was on my own terms (and not having one come to me), although I could never see myself becoming a real storm chaser or anything.