Now, more than ever before, the world needs cute cat videos.

Kittens are hilariously insane. Just cute, fluffy balls of hunter instincts, lightning reflexes, amazing musculature, caffeine, rubber bands, and firecrackers. You might not get as much affection from a kitten as from an older cat, but you can sure as hell get some entertainment.

I guess it’s time I wrote down my thoughts at this period of history. Nothing even vaguely comparable to the devastation of Japan has happened in my lifetime. Not even New Orleans and Katrina can compare. This is like Katrina a thousand times over in a very small space.

Normally, being an edge of the herd word nerd, I avoid talking about what everyone else is talking about as a matter of course. A matter of instinct, even. What’s the point? What am I going to say that a million other people aren’t also saying? I would ask myself.

But this is too big for such petty concerns. I write this entry tonight not as a writer or as a journalist or a historian or an analyst or anything at all except a diarist. This is my blog, and these are my thoughts.

I must confess that I have been completely letting my Twitter feed be the intermediary between me and news of what is going on in Japan. It’s my mechanism for getting the news in handle-able chunks from the twitter feeds of people like William Gibson and Roger Ebert and thus keeping the whole big picture reality of it from hitting me all at once.

Because this is just too big to handle. I was going to write about this yesterday, closer to the main even, but I just couldn’t. It was too huge. When I first heard about the event from Twitter late Thursday night, one of my first thoughts was that I was experience that “9/11 feeling”… that feeling that something absolutely massive was happening, something that would change everything that came after it and that therefore was simply impossible to truly process in realtime. You have to process it a litle at a time, and when you think about it, we are still getting over 9/11 and it’s almost ten years.

And honestly, not for nothing America, but this makes 9/11 look kinda small by comparison.

How big? From a global perspective, the earthquake was so severe that it shifted the Earth’s axial tilt by ten whole inches. Imagine that, just try to wrap your brain around that. It shook the whole world so hard that it changes the entire planet’s tilt relative to the sun by almost a foot. Imagine the kind of kinetic energy that would take, the sheer magnitude of the forces involved in moving all 6,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000 (6E+24) kilograms of the Earth by that much. And without any external forces contributing at all, simply from the shifting of the contents of the planet itself.

Take the scale down one level. This is a disaster which is devastating an entire nation. A prosperous nation, with a large population, a powerful economy, an ancient and complex cultural history, a center of progress and innovation, scholarship and research, artistic invention and extraordinary energy and drive.

And late Thursday night, half of it was knocked down then washed away.

According to the USGS, roughly 2.4 kilometers of Japanese coastline was simply washed away by the tsunami. Think about that. Go to your nearest beach or lakeshore. Stand close to the water and look out over it. Now imagine that you see a 10 meter (roughly thirty foot) wall of water coming directly at you. It is taller than a big rug truck. It is taller than your house. It is taller than most trees. It is so tall, in fact, that you can’t even take in its entire height in your field of vision. It is a new horizon and it is coming towards you at five hundred miles per hour.

Now turn inland and imagine that, should you miraculously survive the wrath of Poseidon and thus get to gaze upon the strange and terrible new world that the water leaves behind, the new beach is two point four kilometers, or roughly a mile, from where you started. Everything in between the old beach and the new one is gone, washed out to sea. Homes. Cars. Streets. People. Lives. History. Context. All wiped away like they were nothing but chalk on the blackboard.

One click down in scale again. Tokyo. This is one of the top metropolises in the entire world. It is, without a doubt, a World class City, on the same list as Paris, London, New York City, and Beijing. Population density alone would make Tokyo an especially tragic spot for such a catastrophic disaster. (there’s really no words big enough to describe it, are there? Even “Biblical”, the usual go to for really big badness, is not nearly a big enough word for this. Nothing in the Bible comes close to this. )

But Tokyo is also a center of world commerce. Its stock exchange rivals the NYSE. Billions of dollar flow through the financial veins of Tokyo daily. So who knows what will happen to the global economy because of all of this? How many billions of dollars of assets just vanished from the scales of history?

Click one level of scale down again….. but I don’t want to click one level down, because then we get to the human level, and I don’t think I am ready to face that yet.

Maybe some other time.