It's been storming pretty crazy tonight, right? So I get out to my car and the whole thing smells like smoke; now that's weird because 1), I don't smoke, especially not in my car and 2) other people don't smoke in my car. So I put the keys in and turn on the lights to select a sick LCD Soundsystem jam to load into my player, and I notice that for the first time in several weeks that the light over the passenger seat is now no longer burnt-out and dead, but glowing incredibly brightly.
I didn't change the bulb. I highly doubt some smoky mechanic snuck in and changed the bulb in the middle of the lightning storm-- so what am I to make of this? I mean, why else would there suddenly be a surge of functioning electricity in what was previously dead? What brings the dead back to life except defibrillators (and mouth to mouth and God)? When else does something smoke except in the presence of intense heat or energy?
MY CAR WAS FREAKING STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, OR SOMETHING ALONG THOSE VERY EXCITING LINES.
So I imagine what it would have been like to be inside the car when the lightning struck and I become very excited, and I turn the music up louder. I think about what it would be like to feel the thousands and thousands of volts of electricity coursing through my veins. It would have been incredible. Sure, I might have died, but for those few instants, I would have been incredibly powerful, and everything would have been so bright!! The song I was listening to was especially appropriate, given that I had just finished reading a coming-of-age story by Sherman Alexie about indians -- it was "Tribulations" by LCD Soundsystem. In fact, you should cue it up right now and listen to it as you read the rest of this post because it completes the picture of what I'm about to tell you:
So I'm driving around through the night, right -- on this caffeine-infused, caffeine-driven mission -- and I'm looking up at the gigantic streaks of lightning coursing through the purple sky. LCD is feeding me these lyrics about "[Getting] your payments from the nation / For your trials and tribulations" and I'm thinking about the largely autobiographical book I just read, and about how so many people think Indians are just this governmentally-supported, now impure (at best) race of people who are almost completely extinct. I'm thinking about how arrogant I was when I first started reading this book, thinking that because it was about Indians it had to have been set in the past because no-one really comes in real contact with pureblood Indians anymore. And about how the English/Caucasians came into this country and drove the Indians through Hell and misery because we were so arrogant to think that it was our destiny, that we had a right to do so because we had suffered and we had technology and innovation and were "sophisticated" and were on a mission from God. And I'm looking up at the sky and seeing the lightning burst through the clouds and thinking about the vast expanses of land that exist beneath it, where not just one person but hundreds, thousands of different sorts of people can look up and see the same surge of pure power crackling through the gigantic sky, and about how when you're staring up at all that immense power, all our little worries, all our little homework assignments and our quibbles with friends and lovers and ex-lovers just become so completely irrelevant. And I wish I had that in my veins-- that instead of blood, all I had was pure electricity flowing through me all the time. I would never stop living, never stop moving-- I would be like Dean Moriarty from Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," always excited about life, never troubled, never ceasing, never allowing unhappiness or worry to get any vague sort of stronghold.
But part of me, while driving around is thinking about the (albeit unlikely, but still somewhat prevalent) possibility of real death by electrocution; I'm thinking that maybe at some point, the friction between some parts of my car and other parts of my car, or the parts of my car that sound like they're dragging across the ground when I bound over sidewalk curves against the probably still highly electrically-charged ground will re-ignite my smoky car with it's newly excited lightbulb, and it will catch flame or explode. But I'm also kind of hoping that it does so, that the electricity is somehow re-serviced and returns to fill me with 100% energy, hopefully for more than just a few seconds so I can shriek and screech as loud as I've ever shrieked or screeched and everyone in a 1 mile radius will know that I have it.
And all I want to do is drive around and around and around and listen to LCD Soundsystem and watch the lightning and conjure a million truths about the similarities and likenesses between all people, how we're all bound up under an immense and incredible power, but instead I go to Wal-Mart (because they always have low prices) and purchase Red Bull, pretzels, one Amp energy drink, and some assorted candy, and go back to my dorm because the storm is subsiding and I have homework to do.
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