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Brace Yourself |
by Anne Hallock
One of the first times I visited Restoration Hardware, I picked up the Worst Case Scenario Guide back when it had a respectable yellow cover and its respectable, unexpected-disaster theme.
There's this page that describes "What to Do in a Falling Elevator" (I'm sure it asked you to check the requisite brakes/emergency stops/etc.) but really it's about screwing everyone around you to make sure you survive. And no, we're not talking about the same kind of screwing that would occur on page 67, "What to Do in Case of Nuclear Fallout." This involves -- according to my hazy recollection -- climbing on top of all the panicked de facto lemmings so that, when your deathpod makes impact with P12, your human mattress allows you to feel no pea.
This stuck in my memory more so than, say, "How to Untie Yourself from the Railroad Tracks in the Face of an Oncoming Train," for a couple reasons. One, I have elevator malfunction dreams a lot. And unless you're holding a golden ticket, I'll venture to guess that most elevator dreams are nightmares for us. In the way that opening a cookie and keeping an eye out for the luck that's coming your way makes sense, could this have been God pointing me toward the nearest cosmic emergency exit? It gave me serious pause. I mean here it is -- a book (I love books!) and it's yellow (I love yellow!) telling me about disaster preparedness (I love disaster!). The second reason this really struck me is the kill-or-be-killed factor. To this day, I can't decide if they're serious in their suggestion that you hose everyone else in your little car of doom on the off chance that their crumbling bones would break your fall. I read this book, I follow its advice, karma laughs, and the earth spins just a bit faster to show who's boss.
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This weekend I'm ashamed to admit I patronized a very falling-elevator sort of ride at a not-even local theme park. Yes, on purpose. I kicked off my shoes at the last minute, and as they disappeared under the line of my harness it made me think of shoes on the freeway and how they say fear shrinks your feet. I pictured my bare toes curling up underneath me and my brother Tom was right -- at a certain point you're more scared to be up so high than the fact that you'll be falling and right soon. I looked down and around but couldn't look up to see nothing above me. We dropped like leggy dolls off a refrigerator box.
I couldn't bring myself to scream on that stupid ride because I knew it felt real but it wasn't real. Not like at the county fair where part of the thrill is knowing some drunk carney was supposed to snap those pins in right and did he? Did he?? And it wouldn't have been 'woohoo' screaming -- this ride called for 'help me lord' kinda screaming -- and I just knew that feeling afraid and being okay and screaming just to hear the sound would have been cheating somehow. And I think it's the same reason that my falling elevator would have to just let me sit my butt down and say a few silent goodbyes - 'cause at some point there's an honesty you can't get around. 'Cause I can't see kneeling on knees and shoving off shoulders, crowd surfing up those walls, hitting that basement and still having to explain to Mr. Jesus that I was crawling on top of her, see, 'cause I was shopping at Restoration Hardware, see...
Anne Hallock tried to write her first novel using the memory feature on a secondhand word processing machine. It was about a girl who gets kidnapped into an underground cave, or "crevasse," as she described it at the time. She gave up when she got tired of scrolling to the end of the screen at the start of every session. She has bastardized the craft in a handful of post-undergrad PR jobs, and in a prolific, but short-lived, blogging stint motivated by her desperate attempts to get a boy to notice her. She hopes he notices this, and then chokes on a pretzel.
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