There’s something out there

Each of the last two days, I’ve had something really strange and unexplainable happen on the way to work.

Yesterday, I was just driving along behind a suburban when suddenly I found myself in a shower of glass. It was like that scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo flies the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid field, and he’s somehow able to navigate the tight spaces between asteroids while the empirical troops giving chase in their TIE fighters are not.

Except I was more like the TIE fighters. Glass was everywhere—over, under, and smashing into my car. No damage, no flat tires, thankfully. OK, there may have been some damage, but my Subaru has 154,000 miles on it. I don’t really care about a few superficial dings in the exterior.

The thing I wonder about is what caused the rear passenger side window of this Suburban to spontaneously explode? Was it road rage and another driver shot out the window? Couldn’t be, because I’d think in that situation it would implode and the glass would end up in the car. But I’m no physicist, so maybe not. Regardless, it was strange.

Today’s weird occurrence happened in about the same spot on I-15. As the season is changing, the air is getting even drier still than it has been. Which means that the skin on my hands is starting to dry and crack, and my nasal cavity is becoming lined with the famous Utah boogers.

If you grew up in Utah, you may not know that Utah boogers are different than boogers elsewhere. But if you moved to Utah from somewhere else, or lived somewhere else and moved back, you know that the dry air dries out everything, including the lining of your nasal cavity. The result: Utah boogers. Bigger, drier, harder to expel than garden variety non-desert state boogers.

To deal with said boogers, I keep a box of kleenexes in my car. I also keep purell in my car and a salted nut roll in the glove box in case I get hungry. And a floor pump. I’m kind of a boy scout that way. But I’m getting off track. Anyway, this morning I grabbed a kleenex to blow my nose and clear out some Utah boogers.

As I mentioned, they can be kind of hard to expel, so I blew pretty hard. Hard enough that I’m pretty sure one that required significant force to dislodge gained enough momentum when it finally broke free that it blew right past the end of the kleenex and onto something else.

Of course I panicked, not wanting to walk into work with a booger on my jacket. I looked everywhere for that thing. Or at least as close to everywhere as one can at 80 mph. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. It was gone. Did it vaporize? Did I only imagine that it cleared the kleenex? I really don’t know. But I couldn’t see it anywhere on my jacket or pants or the upholstery of my car.

If you see me today, and you see a booger anywhere on my person, please discretely let me know.