Day #68 – Thump! Whoa! Whew!

Wow, that scared me! I completely freaked myself out this weekend, in a moment of terrifying, that-could-have-kick-started-a-heart-attack, accident and misinterpretation. Here is a lesson I learned really, really quick: Road construction workers wearing their reflective vests, look almost identical to those big orange barrel-shaped traffic cones. Especially when they are kneeling down. And have their back to you. At around dusk.

The library. That was my only destination. I had no desire to attend a horror carnival where I would be taking five years off my life, which for a split second I thought would just be five years off my jail sentence. I swear I only looked down for half of a third of a fraction of a nanosecond. It was all the radio station’s fault really. No one actually even liked “Come On Eileen” back in the 1980s, so why would you still be playing it over twenty years later? I had no choice but to change the station. So if I really had killed a road worker, I bet the jury would have understood.

But I didn’t kill anyone. I just swerved six inches in the wrong direction, and creamed a traffic cone. The side of my car looks like it hit a giant clown fish, and the cone looks like it’s bowing to a Japanese emperor, but at least no one actually got hurt. The problem was, there was a traffic guy about ten feet away, kneeling by the curb, and he popped up in shock when he heard the thump. So my experience went like this: Song comes on—ears start hurting—bad flashbacks from my school days start coming on—fear of a horrible song getting stuck in my head, forces me to act—I look down—turn a knob—hear a really loud thump—look up just in time to see, out of the corner of my eye, something orange and white bouncing off my car—and immediately see some orange and white guy stand up with shock on his face. What conclusion would your brain leap to?

Now in reality I was just coming off a red light so I was only going about ten miles an hour, but I still saw the future face of my bunkmate in my cell on death row, in that fraction of a second. He was big and ugly, sure, but that wasn’t the hard part. What really bugged me was that I was on death row because of “Come On Eileen.”

So, no harm was really done. The cone and my heart should just pop back into place. But that was one horrific nanosecond. I have no idea how much I freaked out the nice traffic guy, but when I came to a stop, he gave me an awkward little smile (like he would have enjoyed testifying against me) and then waved me on. The very first thing I am going to do after writing this—and, well, maybe after a Dr. Pepper or two (this trauma stuff makes me thirsty) and maybe one of those little pizza bagels—is sit down and write a letter to the highway department, pleading for them to dress their workers in any other color. Blue would be a good choice. That way if I ever did hit someone, it would match my car better. (Okay, that was a little dark. Sorry.)

Reputation@Stake

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