Last Friday, I saw three improbable things in the space of ten minutes.
1. On my way to physical therapy, I drove out of a parking deck and saw, parked on George Street between the dorms, a car carrier the top level of which was filled with golf carts. I had never seen a car carrier layered with golf carts, so I was immediately paying attention. I made an illegal left turn because shaaaa, went through the jughandle, up Huntington Street, down College Avenue to the canal, all in the space of less than a quarter mile. Directly in front of me, where the bike path across the Lynch Bridge ends in gravel and tears,
2. two tall men on golf carts stared back at me in panic and with no idea what to do. This is the exact spot where, just the night before, I’d told Pete I see someone get off a bicycle every day, and every day it’s a different person. These two guys had crossed the river on the bike path under the terrible misapprehension that no decent architect or civil engineer would build a bike path without an exit and they had discovered to their horror they were both tediously right and mysteriously wrong. I drove away before anyone could ask my advice, because no one needs that, by which I mean I’d explain golf carts make great submarines – briefly. Four turns later, I pulled into the PT building’s parking lot, where a delivery truck blocked the front door. A whole lot of identical boxes lay on the ground,
3. right side up, upside down and on their sides. From a distance, this looked unremarkable. Up close, I could see the driver wrestling a wooden pallet inside the truck and it looked like the pallet had a shot at the championship belt. The boxes on the ground were spread out like a map of Lower Manhattan. I walked down Varick and took the tunnel into the gym where I wear zebra print bedroom slippers and my lovely therapist Ghenghis throws medicine balls at me for fun.
Sure, that was odd, but this evening, I was making dinner. Also: beyond the coop, the people of the chickens suddenly freaked the fuck out. They live in two houses separated only by a driveway and these two women are sisters-in-law and I did not hallucinate this all this shouty shouting.
Brunette: Hey! Hey! The chickens are eating my green peas!
Blonde: I am so sick of this! *bursts into tears*
Pete was watering the garden in our backyard, dropped the garden hose and marched through the kitchen on his way to NOT LISTENING somewhere further away. I couldn’t believe my ears so I looked across the yard, where a little girl stood, bored and not crying. The blonde appeared to be talking and crying and for a second I was trying to match up the sounds with the face and yes, yes, the blonde was making these impossible noises and in my brain, all I could hear was No, no, this is not happening. I quietly reached for the door handle and closed the door without a sound because I’m sorry, that is a person crying about live chickens. And that was really improbable.
Poor Impulse Control 
Mama said there’d be days like this.
One day while working at AT&T in Morristown, just down the street from the Governor Morris Inn, two unusual event occurred. The first was that the lids of all three very large coffee urns in the cafeteria (the stainless steel kind that are all lined up next to each other and plumbed in for refilling and so on) blew off simultaneously. I assumed the grounds were tired of having hot water poured on them and were making a break for it. Shortly after that, someone came upstairs to tell my office-mate that her car was “in the woods.” Her car had slipped its brake, rolled roughly forty feet to the edge of the parking lot, hopped over the curb, rolled down an embankment, and was sitting passively doing its nails about eight feet from a small stream. It had managed to narrowly miss several large tree as it went down the ten foot embankment and was essentially unharmed, but lonely and missed its mother.
I went downstairs and looked at her car at around 9:30, then I went upstairs, packed up my things, and took the rest of the day off. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do.
Yep yep yep yep. Whaddyagonnadoo?
The key to never being in a disaster is avoiding places where a disaster is about to happen.