Bad Stretch of Time

A week ago I spent a day with Lazlo Kominski and got to listen to a couple of stories, one of which included Kominski's current Bad Stretch of Time, or BST. Without divulging details, this particular story includes several dramatic plot points, not to mention a couple of plot twists, and a good amount of back story. We live long enough and each of us will experience a BST, though certainly one person's BST might not seem so bad to someone who has endured a worse one. I gave Kominski some details about my own BST, which occurred many years ago but still plays into nearly every decision I make. Then we went into San Francisco where we looked at some books and had a beer, and the story-telling and conversation continued along July 4th sidewalk traffic that seemed eerily light.

How we in fact endure strings of very bad things varies, certainly; some of us choose medication, some of us choos denial, and some of us choose nothing. My father once experienced a brief BST, and I remember him telling someone that "things like this always seem to happen close together." My father would one day have a starring role in my own BST, and he ended up being quite right about the "close together" part.

I think of all this BST stuff because a couple of days ago I was driving home from work and watched a car fishtail and skid across 3 lanes of traffic, remarkably without hitting another vehicle. I lost sight of the car for a moment, and when I saw it again it was resting on its roof on the side of the freeway. My informal calculations determined that there was no room for the car to have flipped only once at about 60 miles before a sudden cessation of movement. I have rolled a car off this same freeway, though I was going only 30 MPH. I bounced on my roof and ended up on my wheels in a carpool parking lot, the engine still running, the wheels splayed out. I put the car into reverse and backed into a parking space, and I thought, "That was not fun." Somone stopped to help me and let me use his phone to call my wife so she could pick me up and take me to where I had to teach that night. This was about a year after I confronted someone who was trying to steal my neighbor's car, and that someone got perturbed enough at my attempted intervention to show me the pistol stuck into the front of his pants while I was keeping my eye on the screwdriver he had raised above his head. That wasn't fun, either.

But, neither of those events were part of my BST; in fact, they aren't more than a reflective digression from that car that tumbled and twisted in front of me. I've kept an eye on the news stories since the accident, but I've not seen anything that would tell me what happened, if anyone was hurt. I keep wondering if that moment was the start of a BST for whoever was in the car, or maybe someone's family.