Admit it, some things in life spook us, like being behind trucks with ladders.
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They’re everywhere, these pickups, their loose ladders bouncing about, deadly potential projectiles threatening with every bump to pierce your windshield and remove your head. Oh, the paranoia.
Recently I’m driving down a two-lane highway at a pretty good clip. The right-of-way slopes steeply into the marshy swamps. No room for mistakes. My nerves get neurotic.
I’m sandwiched in behind an 18-wheel Heineken beer truck and a long line of kamikaze bumper-huggers. Boxed in again. With sweaty palms I grip the steering wheel. Paranoia strikes deep.
Flashbacks resurface of being hung-up in the crawl space under my house, hemmed in with occupants of the dark spaces of life. Backing out takes hours, which demonstrates another design flaw in the human anatomy: lack of rear-view eyes. Lesson learned? Avoid boxed-in venues, front row church pews and audible use of the word ‘trump.’
An enticing photo of a frosty Heineken is painted on the truck’s rear panel. It temporarily distracts my mind from this disturbing dilemma. Its momentary reprieve transfers the fear factor over to the taste buds, then back again. The fear is real, the beer an illusion.
A large hand truck swings violently in the truck’s slipstream. It dangles there, hanging by a bungee cord noose like a condemned man waiting for the gallows door to drop. Stenciled beneath it is a warning: “Watch out for flying objects.” Trapped again, caught in the vortex where all options are bad ones.
Thoughts of disaster run wild. My mind does visual take-offs on all that can happen, none of which is good. Like that time I signed a large stack of loan documents. I ask the banker, “Say, Leo, what’s in these documents?” His reply is stenciled into my brain: “Nothing that’s good for you.”
So here I am, visualizing the hand truck flying off, hitting the highway, bouncing a couple of times and sending a twisted mass of steel hurdling through the windshield. A still, small voice whispers in the inner recesses of my brain: “Your morning’s repentance was weak, my son.” Paranoia covers all bases.
Miraculously, luck prevails. Catastrophe is averted. The bungee holds, and the truck turns off to deliver more of its frothy libations. But wait, all’s not well that ends well. Because the day has just begun.
I soon merge onto the interstate, thankful for options, three lanes each side. Good music on the radio, emails quiet, cruise control, life is good. Until I see ‘it.’
Lumbering ahead is a mammoth Caterpillar, twenty tons of yellow steel and rubber tires teetering on the edge of a lowboy trailer. The truck straddles the two outside lanes while traffic backs up, trying to decide what to do. Options narrow again.
This mass of disaster is anchored on the trailer by tiny chains found on a set of yard swings. Soon it’s my time to pass this enormous hunk of impending cataclysm. But wait, some boob in front slows down. Hedged in again, forced to contemplate the caveat written on the truck: “Danger. Wide Load. Stay Back.” No mention of a frosty beer.
Later I’m behind a logging truck. Its pine-tree products protrude waving a red flag and declare, “Watch for Flying Debris.” They’re perfectly positioned to give new meaning to the cliché, ‘a sharp stick in the eye.’
Listen, life is perilous and it’s not all just trucks. Hazards lurk everywhere, from sticky sidewalk chewing gum to random bird droppings from overhead.
Vertigo and the fear of heights make stairwells a snare. Escalators are shoe-eating monsters to the faint of heart, capable of chewing off foot and leg of the less than nimble. Home ladders, while useful, are entrapment devices engineered to lure unsuspecting fools into early hospice.
Don’t forget home elevators, cubicles so small they resemble vertical coffins. Trapped inside, … so long to sanity and a toilet.
Perfect places for paranoia to breed are slick bathroom stone floors and rolled-up corners of kitchen rugs. One fall will end it all.
But look, why carry on with this soliloquy? You have your own neuroses to nurture. Let’s just leave it at that for now.
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Time distills the essence out of everything. In retrospect, the Heineken truck episode was not all that bad. But next time I’ll follow it. I’ve concluded that beer is what’s real; paranoia is only an illusion.
Bud Hearn
August 29, 2017