A fist to the back of your throat by the Almighty himself

And then the spray of glass and plastic blasted up over the back end of my car as my glasses flew off my head as I snapped my neck back. The rear view mirror shot back like someone pulled it away in a violent fit and every light in my dashboard lit up like the control board of a nuclear power plant on full-metal meltdown.

And so goes that last few seconds of my car's life yesterday as I was rear-ended by a car which didn't even to give me the decency of a cacophony of screaming tires before accordining the back end into my back seat in one solid 'whump' that punched my entire body and made me flash David Fincher "Panic Room" style coldly and fearfully, the way you do after you wake up from a nightmare and you can't tell what's real or dream, to the bloated tank of gas freshly filled up at the Gas and Go just a few miles from the impact site. Don't they explode after a collision? They do in the movies.

You have to admire the marksmanship of the person who hit me, with her hood and front bumper dead on to my trunk. Both of our cars mauled like Christians in the Roman arena. Blunt force trauma and elementary physics become the same thing. oh, are those police cars? Mass times velocity equals you are so fucking lucky you are walking away from this one, cowboy. Besides the soreness in my neck and the small mark on the side of my nose that was removed in the tangential toss of my glasses at Ground Zero, I'm fine...Bruce Willis in Unbreakable fine, and being compared to Bruce willis is creepy enough. What gets you is the context, the survival from the crash despite my airbag NOT deploying, is like staring through ice, looking back on yourself in tiny reflective frozen rivulets and being amazed you are your own two feet.

You stare at your car, back end crumpled like paper. You see her baby SUV-like beast and look at the front of it, crunched in, the warped and bent and busted hood training your eye to her exploded airbags, looking a sickly yellow and limp like shed snake skin. Both of you are too tranquil, standing there as traffic flows around you like river water does to a rock in the water's bed. Yeah, gape at us, you joyless little shits. I hope our little improv act makes you better fucking drivers, or makes you reconsider your pointless little lives. Pools of different colored fluids are forming octopus legs under her car, a green, a red, a rainbow shimmering the festive yellow summer sun when the day is perfect at 73 degrees and no wind. Seattle only gets 10 days like this a year, you know. It's like a punch card. Use the 10 and it's done.

Maybe the designers of modern cars didn't expect for this moment, when you both stand there...assailant and victim, looking at your dead metal servants, your commuter cages, wondering how you got here. The machines are dead, but you are doing just peachy. Oh, yes Ms. Firefighter, today's date is Tuesday, July 15. I was wearing my seatbelt. And the driver who hits me, her makeup is running one black shoelace down her face, just under her left eye. Ask if she needs a tissue and she looks at you as if you are from Mars.

Yes, officer, I feel sore, but that may have been from the Bikram hothouse yoga session I had last night. I wonder if I crashed because I actually ate breakfast this morning. My wife....my wife is on the cell phone buzzing in my hand. I forgot about the frantic call I made seconds after the hit. Hit...hit hard....accident on Lake city way...oh god.

The tow trucks arrive. I get my driver's license back. When did I give it someone else? My car won't move. Dead. Juice back to life in an ugly corpse-dance, making the car lurch forward 20 feet for the cleanup crews to begin their vulture work. Sand is being dropped to soak up the fluids. Bits of red and white plastic are being swept, along with chunks of parts from bumpers, faux chrome coverings and a weird positively Radio Shack green plug unit that belongs on a DIY computer kit. An hour after the crash, it looks like it never happened, minus the traffic buildup.

Soon, she is gone with her dead champion and my car is rolled on, me in the screaming metal fist of a tow truck cab, rolling back home, rolling to an auto shop featuring a manager that will tell me at first glance that my car is gone. Phone calls, business cards, an insurance rep who is gunning for minor deity for her clarity and efficency and over-the-phone compassion. I get in touch with my boss. The day off. Someone will fill in. I walk home, up a hill, a mile to my house. I close the door. I drop my bag. It's terribly silent. My overfed cats regard me with a blaise glance that only felines without a care in the world can muster. I'm alive. My wife shakes when she holds me when she sees me for lunch. I'm alive. That's all I knew yesterday.

Note: This was originally a letter sent to my fellow e-mail addict and budding writing friend, Zoe Trope.

Note reloaded: Found out today that Frank Herbert, the guy who wrote all those Dune novels, used to be a reporter at the paper I'm working at now. Wow. To paraphrase my wife, "I thought he was like Tolkien, a guy living somewhere else, like in his own little world." Tom Robbins also worked at our paper, but, dude, Frank Herbert!