I was cooking in my kitchen, maybe 12-13 years ago, when an earthquake hit. My cupboard doors started swinging open, the dishes started sliding out from within them. The stove where I was cooking some scrambled eggs started spraying fire in plumes that engulfed the pan in dragon breath style spurts.
I lived on the second story of an apartment complex and everything was swaying, rolling almost. I knew that I was supposed to get out or get under a door frame or something, but in the moment, I was stuck in a sort of dance, slamming each cupboard door shut and shoving it's contents back into it before they could spill out.
I flicked the stove off and jumped back and forth, closing one door, and then the next. There was kind of a rhythm to it. I remember smiling at that point, the danger hadn't set in at all and I was just dealing with one problem at a time instead of seeing the big picture.
I kept up with it pretty well, but then I noticed that in the living room, my entertainment center, which held my TV, stereo and video game systems, was rocking in a way that looked like it was about to overextend and tilt forwards, crashing everything onto the ground fr a height that I wasn't sure they would survive.
As any respectable bachelor would, I said "fuck that" to my dishes and ran to the entertainment center, spreading my arms and legs, using my whole body to hold the electronics in their respective sections, pushing the whole thing with mostly my chest and face.
Game cases slipped by and splashed onto the floor around me, but I managed to use each limb to bar the important, breakable stuff from falling. At one point, a strong "wave" had me pushed so far back, bent nearly in half, that my knees were shaking, threatening to buckle, to keep the thing from flattening me.
With my head turned to the side, cheek pressed against the heft of my old tube TV screen, I saw plates and glasses crashing down from the kitchen cabinets. The floor was a mess of broken plates and shards of glass.
Knives had fallen into the plate graveyard from the magnetic strip that previously held them. My George Foreman Grill came barreling out of a high cabinet from above the stove. I watched it make impact with a fallen knife, bouncing the blade into the air, doing several corkscrews before it fell back into the shards of sharp broken things.
I managed to get the entertainment center upright, relieving pressure from against my face and arms and chest, just as the rolling subsided and the shaking ceased. Looking around at the shambles the quake left the rest of my apartment in, everything thrashed and fucked up, in some ways irreparably, I realized how many places I could have been standing at just the exact wrong moment, where I would have been killed or badly injured.
I realized that, even though I'm still proud to have rescued my PS2, my GameCube, and the first TV I ever bought myself after moving out on my own (I still use it in the garage), it wasn't the smart choice.
Epilogue:
In fact, I had been working at Home Depot and took the day off because I had worked insanely long hours the rest of the week. A few minutes after the calamity subsided, my best friend, who also worked at The Depot, showed up to make sure I was okay.
He told me stories of how giant riding lawnmowers were shaken loose from the 16ft racks and came crashing onto the concrete pavement, busting the floors open and sending everyone running. Another work-friend of mine, the guy who was doing the job I would've been doing if I hadn't decided to take the day off, was using a forklift to place a box of crowbars into a rack when the shaking nearly toppled the lift and decimated the pallet that the crowbars were on.
Motherfucking *crowbars* rained down on him, many of them came right through the couple of iron bars that made the cage like roof of the forklift. One of them smacked him just beneath the eye and gave him the most insane black eye I've ever seen to this day- the closest thing to it are the fake, prosthetic facial injuries from boxing, like in a movie.
His eye was all swollen shut and it looked like he was having an allergic reaction to a bee sting. This was maybe 12 years ago. Nobody was seriously (or fatally, at least) injured that I am aware of.
Username: WalterPolyglot