Not kaboom

Good news. There wasn’t a bomb — the sus­pi­ciously parked car was, well, just that. A Car. Parked. Suspiciously.

Bad news. For a few moments this after­noon, as I watched the road being sealed off and con­tem­plated my mor­tal­ity and how strong so-called strengthened win­dows really are, I kind of wanted it to be a real bomb. Cartoon-like in appear­ance — a large, round black thing, with the word “BOMB” prin­ted on it in large white let­ters, and a com­ic­ally long fuse with a spark trav­el­ling inex­or­ably towards its final des­tin­a­tion. You see, I was hav­ing a bit of an epi­phany at that pre­cise moment; briefly, all seemed right with the world and my mind felt oddly calm, yet I was also thor­oughly con­fused by everything — so, nat­ur­ally, I didn’t want the moment to end. A large bomb might have allowed that moment to go on forever.

Before any­one writes in, I also appre­ci­ate that a desire to have a bomb explode does dis­play a cer­tain lack of care and con­cern for one’s fel­low humans. How­ever, I am entirely sure that I could have explained the very good sense of exper­i­en­cing sud­den anni­hil­a­tion by a large explos­ive device to those people whom I cher­ish and value, and from that point onwards they would have wel­comed it with open arms.

Lack of cata­clys­mic thun­der­storms does this to me. I hope you understand.