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Street Lamps, Hello!?!?
03.23.03
So I’m driving home from a friend’s
bachelor party the other night and what normally
goes through my head is strange enough, but when
you have tired of the radio, turned it off, and
you’re not really that sleepy because your
2nd wind has hit you. By the way, it’s 3:30am.
When I was younger, my “2nd wind”
hit me around 6am-7am the next morning of no sleep.
These days, it’s more like 3am. The “tired”
sets in around 11pm if I’m sitting still
or watching a movie. Anyway, it hit me, and I
was fine to drive. In an ocean of random thoughts,
it had occurred to me that a portion of street
lights were no where to be seen in quite an odd
spot not to have them. All I could see were the
faint lights through light fog coming from the
mall ahead.
All of a sudden (there HAS to be a better phrase
out there that lets people know that your story
is climaxing instead of what I just used and,
of course, “suddenly”), right as I
was passing underneath a dark bridge, I noticed
a black car parked in the middle of the highway
with it’s lights off. I was going about
60-65 and didn’t see it until I was about
10 feet from it. That may sound like an exaggeration,
but I swear it’s not. I then, automatically
jerked the wheel about 5 inches to the right and
then back straight again as if some sort of fail-safe
went off in my arm. Felt like someone jerked my
arm to be exact. I thought everything was going
to be ok at that point, but ooohh no. The car
started shuddering hard, jerking from left to
right quickly until I spun 180 degrees back into
the middle lane of the highway. The car stalled.
So now I’m facing ongoing traffic with a
black car in front of me and about three or four
cars coming from a way’s away (counted the
headlights). By this point, I’m pretty much
frozen. I suppose I used up the reaction juice
I had during the maneuver. I wish (not really)
I could tell you that my car restarted after a
while and just when I was able to U-turn, a car
missed me by inches, but here’s where the
story joins reality again. I think most of those
people saw my headlights facing them though dimmed
due to a lack of power being pumped though the
car. I think the car may have been even more scared
than me. Kind of resembled a scared child curled
up in a corner. Not wanting to go anywhere for
a moment until it collected itself. They slowed
and allowed me to pull onto the shoulder, where
all I could think about was getting home safe
and sound. And I did.
It’s easy to say, “Someone was looking
out for me.” And I actually believe that,
but let’s assume for a moment it had nothing
to do with preternatural forces. Do you simply
chalk it up to something reaction based? That
since I had no mind altering substances in my
body at the time, that my reaction speed is that
good? I was too close to that car to do what I
did to make it safely around. That moment happened
over 3 months ago, and it still grates me. It
reminds me of times when friends would joke around
by calling me a Jedi Master. Now, for the record,
I don’t believe that I have Jedi powers,
or that lightsabers are real, or that Yoda will
one day walk through my door and one day prove
me wrong, but little things happen in my everyday
life that starts tipping the scales of fantasy
and sensibility. It’s true, I spent a great
deal of my time as a child making believe that
I had super powers where I could fling green energy
bolts from my hands, but now that I’m an
adult, they’re actually blue. Just kidding.
Stop lights. It seems that every time I approach
one and concentrate real hard I can change them
from red to green. Did I send an electrical impulse
from my brain to the mechanism that controls the
stop lights? I can catch anything that shouldn’t
normally be falling such as a glass out of someone’s
hands. Once, at a party, my buds were tossing
a Styrofoam ball around (didn’t realize
it at the time though), and to be funny, someone
threw it at my head, and I pulled this Bruce Lee
catch out of my ass. There are more, but you wouldn’t
believe me anyway.
Here’s my point (you mean there is one?
wow.) Consider for a moment that maybe; just maybe,
everyone has these powers already. I mean, what
exactly IS “locked” in the other 90%
of the brain. It’s like having a 10GB hard
drive and keeping yourself from using more than
1GB (and preventing yourself from viewing the
other 9GB of porn). Scientists make the speculation
that we only use 10% of the brain (anyone ever
wonder how EXACTLY they came up with that figure?)
and perhaps one day we’ll unlock the rest.
I don’t know about anyone else but I feel
more like my brain is using an evaluation copy
of Windows and we’ll never fully understand
how the Fax function works. Some of you just said
to yourself, “There’s a fax function?!”
Yeah… there is.
What a waste. To have all of this extra space
in your head and no way to open it up. I’ll
bet that even Steven Hawkings only uses about
20% since he’s the smartest person in the
world right now. And it’s not that there
aren’t people out there trying. I guess
you could say we’re all like a bag of cookies
with individually wrapped packages of a designated
amounts, where only one bag isn’t tamper-proof.
Mmmm, cookies. That sounds pretty good right
now. I have caramel cookies around here somewhere.
But they’re about the size of a dime, and
they really don’t taste like caramel…
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