Remember That One Time When Kansas Tried To Kill Me (Again)?
I'm on my way home yesterday from work on what passes a freeway here. It's really a highway or if you want to get all technical, it's a turnpike since it involves an intricate scheme involving paying to drive on it in the form of tolls. I'd just hung up the phone, leaving my mom a message. Oh, that's another thing you can do here: Yap incessantly into the phone. While you hold it to your ear. And hold the steering wheel. At the same time. Crazypants circustown, I know.
So I'm approaching the toll plaza when the glint of the sun catches a minivan windshield and thus my attention. And that little lizard in your brain, y'know the one that is good with the instant judgment calls on stuff?
"Fire bad"
"Tree good"
"No drink bleach"
"No play in traffic"
"Drink more"
Yeah, that part of your brain that correctly can assess a situation even when functioning on negative beta waves. That part in my brain correctly assesses the situation. That assessment being:
"HOLY SHIT"
A wrong-way driver was coming directly at me at good 60-or-so MPH clip. I swerve out of the way of the wrong-way driver and manage not to get side-swiped by the other driver behind me who is freaking out on a level I cannot achieve. And who has decided that swerving in and out of as many turnpike lanes as possible as though they were trying to strafe a clocktower sniper is a correct survival choice.
Now, there are two things I'd like to point here, besides my original thesis that Kansas Is A Son Of Whore, because the natural order of things already agrees on that point.
Point One:
This would never happen in Los Angeles.
Why?
Because in order for someone to drive the wrong way on the freeway into opposing traffic presupposes that the freeway lacks a certain amount of perpetual congestion to make this all come together.
Point Two:
There is no such thing as the life before your eyes. There is no slow montage of all the children you're supposed to have and that time in Cincinnati that hasn't happened yet and your meteoric rise to fame after your stint in rehab.
There is only white noise in your noggin.
The white noise of being afeared.
If you run back the tape of the white noise at a slower RPM, it sounds something like:
'ARGHGGGGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHNNNNNNNN!!!!!11111''
It's science, I should know.
So I'm approaching the toll plaza when the glint of the sun catches a minivan windshield and thus my attention. And that little lizard in your brain, y'know the one that is good with the instant judgment calls on stuff?
"Fire bad"
"Tree good"
"No drink bleach"
"No play in traffic"
"Drink more"
Yeah, that part of your brain that correctly can assess a situation even when functioning on negative beta waves. That part in my brain correctly assesses the situation. That assessment being:
"HOLY SHIT"
A wrong-way driver was coming directly at me at good 60-or-so MPH clip. I swerve out of the way of the wrong-way driver and manage not to get side-swiped by the other driver behind me who is freaking out on a level I cannot achieve. And who has decided that swerving in and out of as many turnpike lanes as possible as though they were trying to strafe a clocktower sniper is a correct survival choice.
Now, there are two things I'd like to point here, besides my original thesis that Kansas Is A Son Of Whore, because the natural order of things already agrees on that point.
Point One:
This would never happen in Los Angeles.
Why?
Because in order for someone to drive the wrong way on the freeway into opposing traffic presupposes that the freeway lacks a certain amount of perpetual congestion to make this all come together.
Point Two:
There is no such thing as the life before your eyes. There is no slow montage of all the children you're supposed to have and that time in Cincinnati that hasn't happened yet and your meteoric rise to fame after your stint in rehab.
There is only white noise in your noggin.
The white noise of being afeared.
If you run back the tape of the white noise at a slower RPM, it sounds something like:
'ARGHGGGGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHNNNNNNNN!!!!!11111''
It's science, I should know.