Terror on Twelfth Street

As you know, we work across the street from the Twin Towers of the Federal Building in Downtown Oakland, and there's at least a couple of terrorist trigger items in that. So I went immediately onto orange alert status when a colossal red Coca-Cola truck suddenly blocked my path as I attempted to cross 12th street yesterday morning. Even better than a Hanjin or Maersk freight container, I realized, that refrigerated beverage wagon was almost certain to contain a nuclear weapon. That's how I'd do it, don't think I haven't given this a lot of thought. And the hapless security guards standing outside their armored kiosk were unwittingly lowering their yellow and black striped crash barrier and allowing the vehicle to back the bomb right down the ramp into the underground loading dock. The driver (was he mexican or iranian, it was hard to tell, shiite, sunni, or maryist catholic?) was wrestling the wheel back and forth in a three-point turn, now blocking not only my own progress but that of the dozens of work-bound commuters in the four lanes of one-way traffic on twelfth.

But you know, when that Improvised Nuclear Device explodes you won't even feel the searing heat, the vaporization of your internal organs, the friction of your profile being blasted against a smooth concrete or scratchy brick wall. It'll just be over, and you'll be much more concerned with properly processing the paperwork necessary to proceed into paradise. Armed with such comforting thoughts I allowed my racing pulse to return to its normal range of hypertension. In the big scheme of life and death, what harm is there in waiting through a couple of traffic signal cycles? And anyway, a nice thermonuclear event would spare us all the bother of trying to figure out what was wrong with this week's software release. A second later, completing his final alignment, the truck bomber had straightened his vehicle parallel to the crosswalk, out of my path, and begun the careful process of backing into the underground garage. Cool, I thought, as I stepped from the curb and ambled toward the diminutive flashing orange hand of the pedestrian signal, this terrorist has me covered.

Only to rediscover the sweetness of existence as this little prick of a Type-A personality suddenly decides he has HAD ENOUGH, and swings his brown Mazda Miata into the parking lane and punches his accelerator around the front of the Coke truck, hitting 45mph in a little over a tenth of a second, his shaved pink face contorting as he sees me directly in his path. But as luck would have it, the plutonium had not been properly centrifuged or adequately packaged, maybe they had the green wire and the red wire reversed. We all went on...