Fancy Running into You Here

Everywhere you look--local newspapers, foreign newspapers, TV clips on Facebook, news and commentary magazines--people are being hit. They are being hit with an array of vehicles including but not limited to supermarket shopping baskets, stray skateboards, bicycles (two- and three-wheel) and in one incident you noted in The Weekly Guardian, a baby carriage, although in The Guardian, the baby carriage was called a pram.

For most of your life, you've avoided being hit by such things, not because you are essentially a graceful person as much as you are a fortunate one. 

Nor is this to suggest you've not experienced many of the experiences individuals the world over think of as accidents in which they and large objects, indeed, often large stationary objects, come in contact.

If you are to be hit with anything, the effective agent is that great intangible vehicle, the idea. On occasion, you catch yourself announcing to the world that you have a gut feeling or its close variant, that you can feel some awareness of impact in your gut, although the more common collision in the areas you inhabit is somewhere in the head, whereupon a sensation is dispatched to the general area of your stomach.

In fairness to the collision, the idea does not seem to you to have any mean spirited or otherwise malevolent intent. Rather it makes itself known to you with an intensity equal to the need to get your interest, which is another way of saying that you, pursuing the warp and woof of your life, may well have your attention focused elsewhere. 

One example of this is the time, back in the days when you were engaged in distance running, you ran into a Chevrolet Impala that was not only light blue, it was parked and driverless. 

Being hit with such intangibles as ideas, like most other things in life, has at least a binary aspect. You are rarely bored, thanks to the Santa Monica Pier arcade of distractions going on inside your head, but as well your chances, even now, of walking into or onto things that would best not be walked into or onto of. 

Having a hip replacement may have put an end to your distance running days, but such limitations should not prevent you from tripping, as recently, over a fallen tree branch large enough for most persons to see or, indeed, walking into a light blue Chevrolet Impala, parked where you least suspect.