Flash Friday 2-21-14, hypnotized, hydrogen, hilight in Flash Friday

Late afternoon traveling south, the sun broken by trees in the meridian separating north bound lanes from the southbound, something heavy and old is on the classics station, foghat, maybe Uriah heap, could be MC5.

“You know I read once,” she paused, “Readers digest maybe, you know, like in a dentist’s office, that there was this stretch of road in like Ohio or Kentucky or something, where they had all these single car accidents. People just driving off the road, mostly sober people, and the scientists finally figured out, cause they, I don’t know, looked at the time of day or something, anyhow, the trees were just close enough that when the sun was just right it was like a hypnotic strobe and these people were like hypnotized into, I don’t know, passing out or going into a fudge state.”

Fugue, I thought. She hated when I corrected her. I didn’t ask ‘What scientists? The freeway hypnosis scientists?’ or any of the other questions I had that would have made it a conversation, adversarial but participatory. I did get a little paranoid about strobing light just inside enough to get under my shades in the driver’s side eye.

“You know why they don’t make those hydrogen blips anymore?”

I translated blip to blimp and almost translated hydrogen to helium except for the steady strobe of light in my left eye peripheral vision had most of my mind concentrating on not being hypnotized.

“Um, cause the Hindenburg blew up?”

“Wow, really? I didn’t check yahoo news this morning.”

“Oh, what were you going to say?”

“What?”

“About why they don’t make,” I paused to remember how she said it, “those hydrogen blips anymore.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I was just asking. Was it cool? The Hindenburg? I mean I know it was probably bad, but was it cool too?”

I held my hand to the left side of my face to block out the sun bytes; I was sure I was a minute away from either crashing or clucking like a chicken.

“Yeah, it was real cool. It was like the highlight of the fourth of July this year in Madison.”

“Wish I had seen. What’ll they do this year ya think?”

I thought ‘I think maybe those weren’t single car accidents. I think maybe she was in those cars and climbed out when they crashed. Maybe they crashed on purpose’, “Um,” I said, “Probably blow up Afghanistan.”

“Cool.”

I went back to spellcheck this one and was surprised at how many words were left out. There should be a word for that like typos is a word for a misspelling, auto-correct is an excuse for telling grandma to meet you at the fuckpond with bread to feed the fucks. A word that means typo by omission. The flash was under twenty minutes, the WTF piece at least seven and I probably still missed things.