When I was little, the thing they told kids about tornadoes was, "they sound like a train." I didn't question what seemed like an absolute, so every time I heard a train whistle in the distance, I shit my pants a little.
When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Bruns, showed my class a horrible made-for-t.v. movie called, The Day After. It was an uplifting little film about nuclear holocaust. Here's what I remember about that movie, after all the bombs went off, people started drinking well water without realizing that it was loaded with radioactive deliciousness. Someone had the unfortunate experience of being outside at the time of the explosion and was instantly blinded. Some man sat on an overturned cow carcass with a shotgun and blew anyone's brain's out who came near what was, presumably, the man's only food source. Steve Gutenberg, of Three Men and a Baby fame, got stir crazy and went outside, then, after a few days, his skin started rotting off. A few days after the explosion, a disgusting looking Gutenberg hobbled to the hospital to find it packed to the gills with people in varying degrees of gamma-ray-induced decay. A baby was born to symbolize hope. Jason Robards (an older, now dead, actor) went looking for his family, and when he got to where his house should have been, he just crumbled in a heap of despair and waited for flesh-eating death to take him away. After the movie, Mr. Bruns emphasized two things. First, the shit in these bombs has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, if one ever goes off, even if you survive the initial blast, which you won't, you can never go outside again for the rest of your life or your flesh will rot off, begging the question, how many packets of Ramen Noodles should I buy to get through the next 80 years. Second, "this could totally happen. Right now, Russia has dozens of Nucs pointed right at us." The Cold War was over by this points, but I didn't sleep for five years. I grew up close to an air force base, and every time a cargo plane flew over my house, I thought the end had come.
There's a satellite falling out of the sky. It's expected to crash sometime in late February or early March. We're not to worry. In the past five years, 328 satellites have fallen out of the sky, and no one has been hurt. After all, the earth is mostly water. In the unlikely event that there is damage or injury, the government is fully prepared to offer some monetary compensation to the victim(s). At four-in-the-morning a few nights ago, when I was sleeping as deeply as I ever do, which is not deeply at all, a window rattling clap of thunder startled me and my heart nearly to death. My first disoriented thought was, the satellite has come early, and it's landed on the White Castle across the street.
Last night I dreamed that I was on a plane that crashed. No big deal, we were only hovering about ten feet from the surface of the ocean when we went down, and we landed on a sandbar. It was really more an inconvenience than anything else. As we switched planes and the young pilot responsible apologized for the mishap then took his seat in the new cockpit I turned to the flight attendant next to me and asked, "are they really going to let this guy fly this plane too?"
"Not to worry," she said, "he just gets it off the ground. Then the real pilot takes over from there." Apparently getting off the ground is the easy part.
