A number of years ago, I was driving – running errands – and
listening to the radio. Well, I wasn’t really listening, I really just had it
on for noise. During my half-way listening, the news came on. One of the
reports was about metal debris flying off the back of a dump truck, leaving a
freeway full of cars, trucks, police and fire emergency vehicles stranded with
flat tires galore. Of course, in my
half-listening state, I what the news reporter said and what I heard
were two different things. Instead of “metal debris” I heard “mental debris”
which snapped me out of my stupor to listen to the rest of the story. I was a
little disappointed to hear that it was just a simple case of tire-flattening
metal shrapnel – although, I was quite sorry for all the people who were left
stranded with 2 or more flat tires, not enough spares, and no way to get off
the freeway. I was also glad that I was not one of the people who fell victim
to this dump-truck driver’s folly.
However, it got me to thinking – and laughing – about all
the possible outcomes of the “mental debris” scenario. What kind of mental
debris would wreak as much havoc as that metal debris?
Among the possible scenarios I could imagine:
- A teenage girl, driving down the highway at 75mph, chatting on her cell phone. Her thoughts spewed out of her brain faster than the speed of sound, splattered out of her mouth and onto the freeway, leaving oily, brain-fuel puddles in her wake.
- The lady in the car following the teenager swerves to avoid an accident with an 18-wheeler in the next lane and skids to a stop on the shoulder, but not before scraping the passenger side of her car against the metal guardrail. The elderly female driver contributes to the teenager’s mental debris when, upon assessing the damage to her car and pondering her near miss, she lost her marbles all over the freeway.
- Another motorist then runs over the mental marbles and teenager’s thought slicks, loses control of his pick-up in a bizarre, cartoon-like fashion, and smashes into the HOV lane's concrete barrier. The driver, after vacating his vehicle and inspecting the damage to his decimated Dodge, promptly blows up in an exaggerated case of road rage. His jagged, mind shrapnel flows out onto the freeway, shredding tires left and right. Trucks and cars careen into each other until they become one huge mass of crushed steel and rubber.
Which then led me to wonder who police and firefighters
would clean up such a mess? I guess they’d need to call out the HazMat unit so
that all of that mental debris wouldn’t contaminate the ground water. With that
much mental waste all over the freeway, they’d have to scrape it up and seal it
in huge vats labeled “Warning! Hazardous Medical Waste” and send it off to the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to determine the degree of risk to
local residents.
And what would the drivers be charged with (the ones who
left their mental debris all over the freeway)? They’d be charged with reckless
driving and endangering the public welfare. Of course, since they had left much
of their mental-ness all over the freeway they may not be competent to stand
trial since, as some might describe it, their engines were running but nobody
was behind the wheel. Then of course, the CDC would have to try and figure out
if they could separate the mental debris and return it to the rightful owners.
On the other hand, if the mental debris caused this much damage to begin with,
do we really want it returned to the rightful owners?
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