Modern Hazards

I was tootling along in my innocuous Honda minivan, possibly singing, when my life flashed in front of my eyes.

As it does.

A montage of really good stuff, actually. Kind of like the Sports Center Highlights Reel, only the soundtrack wasn't great: just my own voice, repeating a filthy variant of "Oh, fiddlesticks!" 

On a sunny morning on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, a late-model muscle-car –– a Shelby or a Mustang (my apologies for blasphemy to whatever car-guy still reading after three paragraphs) –– almost smoked his tires stopping by the side of the road ahead in the distance.

Flinging open his door, the driver jumped out and assumed a classic shooter's stance: dominant arm outstretched, holding, with the other supporting, legs square, eye to the sight. The tiny, deadly, dark circle of muzzle pointing at me.

It's a testimony to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that adrenaline hits the system quicker than the brain can process the need for it. I was already ducking a little (as if my steering wheel would offer any real cover!) before the thought of how fiddlestickingly stupid this was as a way to go: death by sniper.

Adrenaline grants the sensation of time dilation. My irritability about gun culture was accompanied almost simultaneously by a fleeting regret about the very LONG list of things left that I'd hoped to accomplish. And the lightning-flash reel of life highlights.

And then, quicker than a blink, I processed the shooter's details: a fit man in a tan uniform, sunglasses hiding half of his dark face, the light shining off what I really, really hoped was a lawman's badge. I hoped that he wasn't a man in the grips of mental illness, uniform or no. And then, the last thing I recognized: the hair-dryer shape of a radar gun.

Half of South Tampa passed before my heart stopped racing like a rabbit.

I was horrified not simply by the experience but by how I interpreted the situation without the slightest doubt or hesitation.

It felt inevitable that I would be a victim of random gun violence. Of course a shooting was going to happen. A shooting is always going to happen. Why not on the Lee Roy Selmon on that morning? Why not to me?

Weeks later, still trying to find the funny, I consider the radar gun.  My minivan's speedometer tops out at 160 miles per hour, which offers a nice element of the ridiculous ("But officer, I seriously forgot to pick up the kids! At Pit Row!").

​Still, that dark barrel? Pointing my way? Felt like doom only temporarily averted. 
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