The Final Countdown

I know that post title is probably seriously overused, but last night when I was going through some of my stuff looking for my summer clothes, I found an old box of "tapes" and, yes, Europe's "The Final Countdown" was one of them. I brought it upstairs to the "stereo" and listened to it, as well as a few other "tapes," while I undertook the arduous task of cleaning out my Yahoo! mail. An exciting endeavor for a Friday, I know, but I needed something mindless to do because, you see...

I ALMOST DIED YESTERDAY.

Sometime around 5:15 p.m., I was on the Riverline train (connects from Trenton to Camden, the city that beat out Baltimore as the most horrifying city in the nation...Fuck yeah! They need to just evacuate it, burn it to the ground, and then start over. I could help. I do have that thing for starting fires, as many of you know). I was reading through more Kristoffer Carter journal entries than all of his young, nubile Myspace stalkers combined. I was not facing the direction in which the train was traveling. This bothered me somewhat, so I was keeping myself from staring out the window, which is usually my favorite thing to do.

The train was moving along at a nice clip (can you say that when using it for train speed, or is that strictly reserved for things which float on water?), when all of a sudden is started to break HARD. Inertia and all that crap was forcing me back into my seat with enough force to make me almost pee my pants. Thoughts like, "What the FUCK?!" and "I can't believe I'm about to die and I haven't eaten sugar for TWO FUCKING WEEKS! SOMEBODY GET ME A PINT OF CHUBBY HUBBY STAT!" went flying through my mind. Seriously, it was like an airplane landing, but backwards. And on rails.

When the train actually stopped, I had to brace myself against the seat in front of me to prevent my tender frontal lobe from being bruised against my thick skull. I realized I was clutching the Big Red Pen I had been using. Everyone started moving around and checking if everyone else was OK. The conductor came back immediately. "Is everybody OK?" I think a lot of us were still stunned, so I piped up, "Yeah." And then someone asked, "Did we hit something?" And the conductor replied, "No, we missed it."

I don't know what we almost hit, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't worth my life flashing before my eyes!

I was pretty agitated after that, so I switched playlists on my iPod and tried to settle back into wading through years of daily musical epiphanies, usually accompanied by "BRRRRRRMPPHHH"s and Wilson Phillips lyrics. The first line I laid my eyes on: "Time to start livin the epilogue."

INDEED.

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with any countdowns, but I really just chose it because I had been listening to it and because in 1 hour and 20 minutes, lights will dim and my eyes and ears will gobbling up Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

FINALLY!!!