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A Scene From My Head
I always enjoy it when I can look back at a crisis situation and distinguish the phases of instinctual reflex, intellectual understanding and emotional response.
We were driving back from Spokane tonight. It was about 21:30 and we were just into the foothills of the Cascades. It was dusk and the lighting was pretty much pessimal: dark enough to need headlights, but the sky ahead was still bright enough to ruin night vision. Speed limit: 70 mph. Actual speed: 75 mph.
A rough transcription of my mental processes:
...nuclear. Nu-kuh-lur. Silly to care too much about the pronunciation. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Now just Magnetic Resonance Imaging because the Nuclear part scared people. Silly people. They don't seem to mind Positron Emission Tomography. Anti-matter should be scarier to people than just nuclear stuff. Silly people. I like anything that involves positrons. It makes it sound like my brain is an Asimovian positronic net. *BRAP* (BRAP is shorthand for about a 50 millisecond burst of pre-verbal thoughts/autonomic response/muscle-memory twitch. It could be summarized as: SHAPE AHEAD? PREPARE-TO-BRAKE. OBJECT AHEAD! BRAKING-HARD. OBJECT PASSING PASSENGER SIDE. ADRENALINE TO FULL!) My, that was a very close encounter with a rather large deer... In fact, I think we would have hit it if we hadn't braked. Holy shit, we almost hit a deer at 75 mph! The kind of collision where some or all of the animal comes through the windshield at a not-nearly-reduced-enough velocity, killing someone in a horribly tragic and messy fashion! Aaaaaaa! I am so very awake suddenly!
We were driving back from Spokane tonight. It was about 21:30 and we were just into the foothills of the Cascades. It was dusk and the lighting was pretty much pessimal: dark enough to need headlights, but the sky ahead was still bright enough to ruin night vision. Speed limit: 70 mph. Actual speed: 75 mph.
A rough transcription of my mental processes:
...nuclear. Nu-kuh-lur. Silly to care too much about the pronunciation. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Now just Magnetic Resonance Imaging because the Nuclear part scared people. Silly people. They don't seem to mind Positron Emission Tomography. Anti-matter should be scarier to people than just nuclear stuff. Silly people. I like anything that involves positrons. It makes it sound like my brain is an Asimovian positronic net. *BRAP* (BRAP is shorthand for about a 50 millisecond burst of pre-verbal thoughts/autonomic response/muscle-memory twitch. It could be summarized as: SHAPE AHEAD? PREPARE-TO-BRAKE. OBJECT AHEAD! BRAKING-HARD. OBJECT PASSING PASSENGER SIDE. ADRENALINE TO FULL!) My, that was a very close encounter with a rather large deer... In fact, I think we would have hit it if we hadn't braked. Holy shit, we almost hit a deer at 75 mph! The kind of collision where some or all of the animal comes through the windshield at a not-nearly-reduced-enough velocity, killing someone in a horribly tragic and messy fashion! Aaaaaaa! I am so very awake suddenly!