Fate & Circumstance

Fate, circumstance, and the unreliability of our cities’ electrical grid have mildly altered the lives of about a dozen people. Earlier today, while driving on the highway, a car collided with the driver side of our vehicle, while going through an intersection. There was a sudden power outage to the city, shutting off all the lights. To me, as I approached the intersection, it appeared funky, and not right. I began to slow down, but not enough. Another vehicle making their way across the vast intersection hit my car as we serendipitously entered the same physical space in the cosmos, at the same time.

If I was going a little slower, or a little faster, we would be dead. The collision happened towards the aft of my vehicle, just ahead of the left rear tire. The conflicting vectors of the colliding vehicle, and our own, caused our vehicle to spin 200 degrees counter clockwise and land with a calm jerk and a slight startle. Indeed this motion swung my car’s big ass around, and swiped off the front bumper of another vehicle just sittin’ there. But the spinning motion itself dissipated the momentum, and diffused the kinetic energy. Nobody was injured beyond a bump, or scrape, and an inconvenience. The cars looked like paper maché models partially desiccated by a toddler.

Some folks would say: “how lucky, that our modern cars are so safe to render a collision like this no big deal”. But I am not that man.

Cars are Aluminum coffins, death machines we’re forced to enter, at the danger of never leaving them, because of the inconvenient and vast world we’ve constructed that require them. Car culture is Violence. It turns everyone into a deadly enemy, and routine, into danger. I fucking hate driving.

The vehicle we immediately collided with held a mother and two small children, they exited the vehicle, unscathed but shaken. Still clutching their new, colorful toy guns. Harmless specters of America’s other deadly obsession, Firearms. Ironic. Poetic. Often, My own son, three years old, sings: “A B C D E F GUN!”. A grim innocence that we allow. We hasten to instruct, that actual weapons make us all unsafe.

My initial reaction, upon collision, was of immediate relief, neither fear nor surprise. I saw the near fatality less than two seconds before impact. A narrow window, closing, was before the car crossing the intersection. I reasoned the safest place for me to go, would be into that spot, where there was space to dissipate the kinetic energy. I truly didn’t realize until later how close I was to serious injury or death. A moment of haste or hesitation and it would be over. That’s all she wrote. Fin.

I checked on my only passenger, my wife, safe, unscathed. Myself, unscathed. Then hopped out of the car and immediately checked on the others affected. Everyone safe and unharmed. Now financial and time inconvenience is all that remains.

As I mentioned earlier. The collision was precipitated by a city wide power outage. In fact, as the fireman and paramedics that quickly attended us said, fire alarms across the city had been going off because of the outage. The police said that this same intersection had already lost power, and been restored only moments before. The arrival of first responders felt eerily quick. A handful of seconds and they were there. I didn’t imagine it. They were already on their way, unaware as to what danger could be found, but finding it almost instantly.

My wife has become rather good at fitness, she wears an Apple Watch. And that thing immediately called the cops. It knew we crashed, a prescient message on the screen: “It looks like you’ve been in a crash.”. Yes. I know.

There is a clear and stark division between knowing ABOUT something, hypothetically, and understand and mitigating those risks. Quite another to understand intimately the danger by narrowly escaping death in one of these death machines. That’s experience. Having crossed that division at 37 years old in a near fatal incident, my calm exhortations to be safe, careful, and suspicious, are now haunted by the sound of death’s scythe cutting through the air just ahead of me. A near miss.

I’m tired. Very mildly shaken. But mostly Angry. I don’t have time to handle the inconvenience of another tragedy. I attempt to make Stability and Reliability my reputation. A struggle. Now further complicated by this messy thing we call life. On Monday I start a new job, my family is safe, and I have a warm place to sleep. Trauma, some new hidden scars, but nothing beyond what life promises. Which is just life.

-kow