Sangfreud

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Windshield Wiper

This actually belongs with the eventual post about week eighteen, but I keep delaying the rest of the post, so you get it now.

Saturday morning, I drove to work, speeding because I left late from my father's house. Worry not, I travel at five in the morning, so traffic is very light. I forgot my ipod and infomercials are the dominant weekend programming. So, I listened to the white noise of freeway. Suddenly, I noticed a movement. For half a second, I saw a dark shape move an inch in front of me. PUMN An insect struck my windshield, the first. It sounded as though a small water balloon had broken there. I had pulverized it into grainy, yellow snot and water.

While common sense dictates I couldn't identify what sort it used to be, but I had the means once. National Geographic ran a pictorial article (7?) years ago classifying what shape of smear each bug leaves. A full horsefly is easiest: a red and white blotch. The lacewing (maybe dragonfly?) becomes a thread rather than a puddle. A gnat leaves a pinprick of yellow. The rest escape memory. The pertinent victim was a bit larger than a housefly, but not so big as a carpenter bee. It could have been a premature junebug.

In the face of so complete an obliteration, I thought of my preferred means of suicide: a mile-high fall. Strictly speaking, we reach terminal velocity before five hundred feet. The height affords a final, impossible vista, like using Google Earth or games where I am the deity. I do not believe my body could fall - unaided - fast enough to turn it into a similar paste. That sort of discorporation though is the surest death.

Most capital punishments simply starve the brain of oxygen. I am not sure whether a firing squad aims for the head or the heart, likely the latter. This is the source of the recent doubt over lethal injection (despite the practice of doping them up half an hour before). Realistically, Mission Impossible III depicts the best solution. For a long time, I have maintained that strapping a grenade to the convict's head ought to be the norm, but recognized that any relatives might not recognize the compassion in destroying the head. (No one would notice if cremating the body were mandatory. Then I remembered people see him before the funeral, at the execution.) "Owen Davian" - the villain - implants a nitroglycerine pill in Ethan Hunt's skull. Another detonated inside a redshirt, liquefying his brain but left the skull intact.

What was the last thing to go through that insect's head? Its back legs.

© Nicholas Prado <earlier> ^| upward |^ <later> category: Transpirations