I’m sorry I crashed your car. Your silver convertible was parked, windows down, on the other side of the street. What was I thinking in those ten minutes – ten minutes that could demonize my world, your world, everybody watching’s world. I was never good at U-turns, after all, a certain kind of high-stakes American performance – and pressure was mounting in this massively viewed U-turn. When has the fate of the world hung on a U-turn? I was thinking what if I flubbed it, I was looking too much ahead instead of behind, or behind instead of ahead. Then there was time travel…I was gluing a paper airplane for my sons, feel of the balsa wood and smell of the glue; I was fixing the air conditioner. Dad things.
Then bits of language foiled and curled in my mouth – funny what autocorrect does with words. My mouth has a bit of autocorrect in it. Dada, surrealism. Sometimes you get what I mean. When I hear lies, I think I’m on another planet. Those ten insane minutes before everyone in the world slagged off. (We might be ready for the metric system, if we base everything on measures of ten.) Anyway, the car was wrecked. It took the Russians Ten Days in October to change the world. We’ve had future shock; it took me ten minutes.