Pardon the interruption, folks. I’m on a bit of a vacation down in Florida, and I’m just now getting the time to post some stuff I’ve been tinkering with all week.

I wanna start with a quick story about something that happened to me on the 1,000-mile drive down here.

Whenever I make this drive, I always try to leave at 1am or so and drive straight through. So there’s a point during the trek where I’m not really driving. It’s more like mental autopilot, half asleep and half trying to find a radio station in the Carolinas that isn’t in the middle of a 97-song Tim McGraw retrospective. I like the guy’s music just fine, but I heard that goddamn Don’t Take The Girl song three times in three hours. The third time around I was rooting for the bitch to die, y’know?

Anyway, I’m somewhere in North Carolina, the sun’s just coming up, I’m following an 18-wheeler at about 80mph, and I’m really not paying attention.

Did you know that when they have to tow a big rig, they grab it from the back? I think it’s one of those things I probably did know, but never really gave a shit about. If you don’t quite get what I’m saying, here’s a pic to illustrate…

Now here’s what happened. I’m following this truck at a normal distance, but because he be big and I be small, I can’t see anything in front of him. So for all I know, we’re both following a pink bus full of Nazi transvestites.

All of a sudden, the truck in front of me veers into the left lane really quick. Not insane quick or Oh-Shit quick, but quick enough to make my stupid ass sit up and figure out what he’s trying to miss. What I see is the following…

In that split second, it appeared that a tractor trailer was heading right for me, that I was about to become a very odd-looking hood ornament. I almost shit on myself.

But, of course, the truck got no closer. It was moving backwards, being towed as pictured above. The rig being towed was wider than the one towing it, which is how my laughably bad doomsday assumption was a little understandable. The guy in front of me was just changing lanes to get around the wrecker because he was moving at the Speed of Snail. I kept myself from driving off the road to avoid an imaginary collision, and also managed to refrain from doing anything that would require new upholstery and one of those pine tree deodorizer things.

Woke my ass up, that’s for sure. I didn’t blink for three hours after that.

Tags: driving, car accident, tractor trailer