So its das Leben

by BJ Condike

Scientists report that even with all our known faculties, we humans use only ten percent of our brains. What the other ninety percent is for, and how we can utilize it, are topics of much discussion in the literature. One may argue over the exact percentages, but the fact remains people possess untapped mental powers, be they termed extrasensory or paranormal. Claims of telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other beyond-normal powers are difficult to prove, and many questions remain.

I think I have some answers.

First came the lightning.

All I really wanted was to celebrate my Germanic heritage. I couldn’t get enough of Germany’s history, customs, and language. I reveled in German inventiveness and swelled with pride when I thought of the preciseness and dependability of German engineering.

Thunder growled and grumbled as I hustled to my 11:15 German class. I crossed the campus quadrangle through the drizzle, clutching my books in one hand, and balancing my umbrella in the other. With a deafening crack and a blinding flash of light, I found myself flat on my back, dazedly blinking up at a circle of concerned faces.

“Omigod! Are you okay?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Can you move?”

Unseen hands squeezed me like shoppers testing an avocado.

“Dude!”

I shook my head. “What…what happened?”

“You were struck by lightning.”

“One of those small filaments!”

“Knocked you over like a bowling pin.”

“Finger of God, Man! You lit up like a Christmas tree.”

My rescuers helped me rise and gather my things while I recovered my senses. Aside from some lightheadedness and tingling extremities, I detected no serious injuries. I thanked them and hurried off. I would be late to class yet again. So ist das Leben. That’s life.

My German professor could have been a movie character. I swear he was a former U-boat commander. When he wanted to give us a pop quiz, he’d wander around the room waving his arms and yell, “Clear ze decks! Clear ze decks! All books on ze floor!” I half-expected to hear a klaxon horn and him crying, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”

I scored uncharacteristically high on the quiz that day. Miraculously I knew the entire German-English dictionary. I could read German. Speak German. I thought in German. I breathed German. For once I understood why all their verbs landed at the end of the sentence.

Then came the dreams.

I fell asleep in the campus center lounge after lunch. I was exhausted from a late-night game of whist with my three housemates, plus I was noticeably weak from my dance with the lightning bolt. While I slept, disturbing nightmares gripped me with terrible sights, noises, and aromas, a Smellovision of horror in Technicolor and Dolby sound. The dreams were all a-jumble, as if from disconnected movie clips viewed while surfing cable TV.

In the first dream, hundreds of angry eyes chased me, bouncing and bobbing as they grew larger and fiercer. My feet stuck to the floor. I couldn’t run. I fell and screamed as the bloody eyeballs crawled up my legs.

The second dream involved an attack by a malodorous troop of howling monkeys, their blackened mouths snarling and drooling. The screeching animals surrounded me and beat me senseless. In my dream they all spoke German.

The third dream was no less terrifying, as a disembodied white light bore down upon me with a loud whistling noise. The light grew brighter and the whistling louder until the visual and auditory crescendo was too much to bear. A horrendous crash ensued followed by the discordant music of triangles, cymbals, and bells.

I awoke in a sweat with the images still haunting me. With great effort I shook off the feeling and returned to my everyday reality—which reminded me I had to stop at the grocery store. It was my turn to cook dinner for the house, and I planned a Taste of Berlin. I needed to pick up knockwurst, sauerkraut, and the ingredients for German potato salad. My libation of choice for the meal was a seasonal brew by Löwenbräu.

Then came the incidents.

In the market’s vegetable aisle, I pulled out several likely candidates from a Jenga mountain of redpotatoes. The unstable mass collapsed and tumbled at me in an uncontrolled spudslide. Four hundred hysterical potatoes bounced and bobbed toward me, growing larger and fiercer. The spuds knocked me over and entombed my legs in a hundred pounds of starch, skins, and potato eyes.

After the “Code Yellow on Aisle Three” responders extracted me from the tuber avalanche, I paid for my groceries and headed home. At that point I hadn’t connected my nightmare about the eyeballs with the fiasco at the supermarket.

At a long stoplight the baboons attacked.

The local PETA branch had once again “liberated” a variety of animals from our city zoo. A dozen frenzied baboons raised Cain as they enjoyed their sudden and unexpected freedom. They descended upon the snarled traffic en masse. One hefty male screeched loudly as he jumped up and down on my hood and left numerous dents in my shiny new car. He ripped the blades off my windshield wipers and gnawed them like licorice sticks. Shredded pieces of wiper blade dripping out of his mouth like rubberized drool. I opened the car door to yell at him and he punched me in the face. The stench from him and his brethren permeated the car’s ventilation system and made me barf into the passenger seat. I shuddered to think about describing this incident to my insurance company.

That’s when I made the connection between recent events and my weird dreams at the campus center. Two of my three horror stories had come true, as long as one didn’t quibble about baboons not being monkeys. But maybe they are—after all I was studying German culture, not primates.

After the baboons left to terrorize other unsuspecting residents, I sped home, now late for fixing dinner. As I raced to the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, red lights ahead of me flashed left and right and bells ding-ding-dinged their annoying warning. Barrier arms dropped across the railroad crossing, blocking my path. I stomped on my brakes but felt no resistance and pumped air. I pulled on the emergency brake which likewise did nothing. In a panic I rammed the shifter into Park, but all it did was produce a click-click-click-click noise. The car barreled unimpeded toward the barrier while the oncoming train angrily blew its whistle. Guardrails to my right, and cars to my left prevented me from turning. In desperation I slammed the shifter into low gear. The automatic transmission roared in protest and the car slowed, but the vehiclekept plunging toward disaster.

Smashing into the barrier significantly reduced my speed, and the car rolled to rest crossways on the tracks. The monster locomotive was mere seconds away as it bore down upon me and my groceries, its brilliant headlight bulging, a charging cyclops with a whistling howl growing ever louder. I barely escaped before 200-tons of diesel-powered steel smashed into my Mercedes-Benz, creating a 4,000-pound mass of knockwurst, sauerkraut, mashed red potatoes, and German-engineered scrap metal. The locomotive appeared to froth at the mouth from the explosion of a twelve-pack of Oktoberfest beer. The dwindling sound of tinkling glass and rolling hubcaps harmonized to the persistent beat of the railroad crossing’s clanging bells. The overall effect produced a funeral dirge worthy of Wagner.

I no longer had a ride, nor food for dinner, and I was still going to be late.

So ist das Leben.