My karma is blue and black and bruised. He’s taken one too many jabs to the head of late, and the punch-drunk stumbling is getting quite worrisome. I always try to stay positive, but it’d be decent of the Moirai to pull some strings (ba-dum ching) to help me out over here.
As I pulled into my driveway on Friday, all but salivating with anticipation for the weekend, my driver’s side window shattered. Exploded. Possibly imploded. Quit the lucrative career of being a whole window to take a new freelance job being one hundred thousand pieces of window.
The sound it made was unexpected. Not really anything like glass breaking, more like a cascade of dry rice being poured into an empty pan. A sprinkle of tickles bouncing off the concrete, door frame, my seat, my skin.
No rock or branch hit it, it hadn’t been cracked or damaged previously, it just broke for the sake of breaking. The window was nearly 10 years old, which in car-years is about 190 human-years.
I checked myself for cuts in the same way one might check for ticks, picking at any slight aberration in the normal pattern of my skin hoping to find no blood, and stood in my driveway, incredulous. I thought for sure I’d been hit by a stray bullet from a 7-11 hold-up gone wrong, or was the victim of some super secret sound wave technology fired in my general direction from the nearby Fort Meade. It took a good five minutes before I realized I was totally fine, if a bit paranoid and crazy.
My neighbors all saw this happen, and came over to check out the carnage. As they grabbed brooms and my wife went for the Shop-Vac, I picked through the pieces of glass, trying to make sense of what happened, and console my wallet as he cried about his inevitable injury.
Before they could even plug the vacuum in, I made everyone stop. I had an idea. How often in life do you get a pile of safety glass to play with?
Moral of the story: when life breaks your window and costs you hundreds of dollars for no reason, take pictures of beer.
Literature and Libation 