Thursday night, the power went out. It was interesting: it sputtered for a moment, went out, came back on a second later, and then went out again. That really isn’t much to say, since the power has had some issues over the last few weeks. It’s gone out several times lately and I just assumed that this was one of those times.

The power was only out for about thirty seconds before it came back on. I didn’t think much of it besides the fact that I was going to have to reprogram the clocks on my stove and microwave again (all the rest of the clocks in my apartment program themselves). But then, around one o’clock, the power went out again, and just as I was about to fall asleep. On a hunch, I threw on some clothes and looked outside, and what I saw is over there to your right: cops, ambulances, firetrucks… turns out that during that rainy night, some genius decided to head the wrong way down my one-way street and crash headlong into a telephone pole. The crash dislodged a transformer and caused sparks to rain down (the cause of the power outage), or so I heard, since I didn’t get close enough to see.

I can’t help but wonder what possesses a person to do something like that. 80mph down a street I might understand: after all, I do sometimes succumb to the testosterone-driven requirement to be reckless every now and then. But even when I do things like that, I only tend to endanger myself, which is to say that I don’t do it when there are other cars around. This driver had another person in the car. Blows my mind. What’s more, it was raining, for crying out loud. I couldn’t imagine what must could possibly have been going through this person’s mind that would’ve made him or her think that it was okay to take another person’s life and play around with it like that.

Remember, kids: When you play with the big toys, you can get more than yourself in trouble, you can knock the neighbors’ power out too.