joshmorton.com

In order to tell this story, I have to admit something to you. Constantly in the back of my mind, I have this fear that can almost be better described as a haunting knowledge, almost as if it’s not so much a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a terrible thing will happen. Now don’t laugh, because I can’t help those instinctive fears, and it’s certainly not like I can do anything about it, so I just laugh at the possibility, but somewhere in the back of my mind is always this idea that Washington is only one terrorist away from a nuclear attack. Now I’m not betting on this happening any time soon, but at the same time you can never completely disregard the possibility either, given the state of the world today. Background information to help you experience my night as much as is possible.

So rewind to about 10:30 tonight, when six of us went out to the Silver Diner to eat after work tonight. We were sitting alone down at the end of the diner, with one half of us in booth seats along one wall, and one half in regular chairs across the table. JayJay and Kevin were sitting about 5 feet from the corner and the other wall, and I was on the other end probably 9 or 10 feet away. We were sitting with our drinks, waiting to order our food just chatting about whatever, when suddenly the windows at the end of the wall explode and we’re rocked with an unbelievably loud noise coupled with a shower of glass shards flying at us. In the shock of the moment, we all react as best we could. I sat for a split second before realizing everyone next to me was trying to get away, so I stood up and started to run away to make room for the others. As I stand up I start to look back, but I hear Dave, my boss, yelling “Go, go, go.” Immediately I look over to my right and see Steph, our Associate Producer, crawling across the floor trying to get away, and I see one or two others on the floor behind her. Then I turn my focus back to where I’m going, and I start shoving tables out of the way, trying to clear out and get as far away as possible. By this point, I’m starting to feel this force pushing me away from the windows. It wasn’t enough to knock me over, just enough to push me, and I remember thinking to myself, “so this is what the shockwave of an explosion feels like.” In those exact words.

Now, let me rewind a little to about 5:00 tonight, while we were setting up the Auditorium for weekend rehearsal. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason I got this premonition that something really, really terrible was going to happen. I’m not talking like someone’s dog dying or anything like that, I mean really terrible. Referencing the first paragraph, you can safely assume that deep down inside I’m thinking bomb. From time to time, I will admit that I do have these slight ‘premonitions’ which are never typically serious and are usually very fleeting. But for some reason I couldn’t shake this one tonight, and it probably consumed a solid hour of my time, of which I spent a lot of praying for protection while I was busy setting up. I will say this feeling was so genuine I actually considered stopping and asking for prayer with the entire setup crew.

Fast forward back to the exploding glass and the chaos that followed, and now you have a picture of exactly what I’m thinking at this moment. The wall to our right is exploding with an enormous bang. I’m feeling what my instincts deem to be the shockwave of a bomb. Everything within me is telling me to get away. And a few hours earlier, I had a terrible feeling that something really bad was going to happen. So now I’m running away from an exploding wall, towards a sea of diners, many of whom had stood up and were looking our way. My boss is yelling at us to run, and with every reason to believe him, I’m running away, thinking this is the moment I’ve always conceived in the back of my mind. Of course several of the waiters were also in the area, but not close enough to actually be part of the chaos, and after examining the situation objectively, began to yell at us, “Stop, stop, it’s okay.”

My guess is that this whole experience happened in no more than ten seconds, and probably more like 5 or 6. But that’s honestly exactly how I remember the whole event happening. So finally we’ve been stopped, and we began to collect ourselves and try to figure out exactly what happened. JayJay and Kevin, both sitting closest to the windows, were covered in glass, and several of us were bleeding from little nicks and cuts. We looked back, and the entire end of the restaurant looked like a bar fight. Tables were all strewn about, glass was everywhere, all of our drinks were scattered across the floor (except for mine, which I managed to keep in my hand through the entire ordeal, although I spilled the majority of it on myself in the process of running away), and we were left standing in the middle of the diner, trying to calm ourselves. JayJay immediately went to the restroom and began cleaning glass from himself and taking care of a few cuts on his hands. Kevin did the same, and the rest of us tried to figure out (pardon my language, but this is exactly what we’re all thinking) what the hell had just happened.
The diner staff did a really great job of checking on us and making sure we were okay, and we tried to piece together exactly what made the windows explode on us. Interestingly enough, all of us felt that force pushing on us, and the wind had been gusting up over 40mph tonight, and the best thing we could figure is that somehow the diner had depressurized and that caused the windows to literally implode on us. It made sense, as a higher pressure outside would account for the force pushing on us, and for the window to spew glass all over us. So we as a group more or less accepted that as the explanation, and began to move to the other side of the restaurant so we could accomplish our goal, which was to get something to eat. (!! Sidenote: I just now at this very moment pulled a shard of glass out of my ear. It literally was everywhere.)

A few minutes pass, filled mostly with us trying to collectively clean the glass off our clothing, stabilize the shaking hands and legs, and come back down from the adrenaline rush, when Joey, another coworker, strolls in from outside. We begin to tell him how he missed this whole ordeal, only to find out he was sitting outside in his car, talking on the phone, and witnessed the whole thing from the outside. Turns out, the high winds had knocked down the diner’s storage shed earlier in the evening, and while we were sitting inside, the wind picked up a “big u-shaped piece of metal, probably 10 feet by 10 feet, and slammed it into the windows.” It nixed our explanation of the building depressurizing, but made a lot more sense to us on the flipside of the whole experience. Not to mention a 40 mph wind gust explained the force pushing on us.
After the fact, I think we all enjoyed hearing exactly what was going through our minds as the glass beside us inexplicably imploded. Kevin immediately thought gunshots. I thought at first and at last some sort of explosion, with the middle being filled by the possible car coming through the wall. My boss thought someone has thrown a bomb or some type of explosive device through the window, which explained why he was yelling for everyone to leave. The common thread we all pinpointed was some sort of violent act.

Later on, JayJay mentioned how for many people living in the Middle East, that experience was something they live in constant, real fear of, except their fear is justifiably about bombs, gunshots, and explosions. I honestly cannot imagine what’s it’s like to live in the Gaza strip, or Baghdad or the Al Anbar province, where that is a reality of life. You can’t help but be thankful that we live in such a secure place, where the threat may be real but the acts seldom are. I have a whole list of things to be thankful for.

One of the things I’m very thankful for is amazingly cool and calm instincts. Now, I’m not saying that I’m always cool under pressure. There have been several instances, say when all my intelligent lighting turns off in the middle of a concert, where I can run around and get hyped up a lot and probably take longer to figure things out than I should. But in the few instances where my life has truly been in danger, or at least I thought it was, I have steely nerves and amazing instinctive reactions. The time I was sixteen and spun my (mom’s) car out going 70 mph down a slick road is one of those times. My youth pastor later said he looked in his rearview mirror and saw my car up on two wheels sliding sideways down the road. In that moment, perhaps the one where I’ve been in more peril than any other time in my life, I firmly regained control of the car, managed to stop it, keep it on the road, and then safely move it out of the way of oncoming traffic. A similar thing a few years ago when a gust of wind blew my truck sideways on the interstate going over an icy bridge. Traveling at a similar speed, I stayed calm and did the right things to correct out of the spin. Tonight, my life was not realistically in danger, but for those six or seven seconds I thought it was, I felt instincts just take over and do what I deemed necessary and took appropriate action. Most people, especially myself, do better in sports when we’re just instinctively reacting and not thinking about what we’re doing. That’s why it’s so imperative to learn fundamentals when we’re young, so that we grow up reacting the proper way to a ground ball or a hard backhand shot. I’m very thankful that I know I can rely on my instincts in the heat of the moment when things are really on the line.

So that’s my story from tonight. Completely 100% true. I even have a pic on my cellphone of the broken window (they cleaned up the mess before we thought to take pictures). Very enlightening for me to get the first six seconds of how I would react should the real thing ever happen. And a really, really great story to tell for a long time to come.

Oh, and a free dinner.

First of all, let’s just get it out of the way–I failed to finish my remix version of the Vatican II document. I started the second part on the next Thursday night, as was the plan, but quickly got distracted by the fact that it was becoming a five-part post, and quite frankly I just wasn’t feeling that academic. So it got put off, and then put off another week or two, and now here we are three weeks later and still no resolution or even continuation. I will make no excuses, it is what it is. I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way. Moving on to more important things, let’s all take a second to laugh about an astronaut driving 900 miles wearing a diaper to kidnap a fellow astronaut whom she was jealous of.

I love NASA and space exploration, and I think it’s part of our human nature to explore beyond our boundaries and see what’s beyond our backyard, what’s over the mountains, or what’s across the ocean. Space is the next frontier, pardon the cliche, and I don’t think we can help but explore it. Actually, I think it’s taking way too long for us to do it. But this is admittedly very bad PR for NASA, and I’m sure there will be some consequences for this, whether or not they’re formal ones. I just hope one psycho astronaut doesn’t do too much damage to a very worthy program. (On a side note, why is it no one is pointing out the fact that Nowak is married with children? I mean, two single astronauts fighting over a guy is one thing– a married astronaut getting this jealous over another man is another. Those poor children… I think I would put myself up for adoption.)

And come on, if you’re going to drive 900 miles while wearing diapers to try and win back your secret astronaut boyfriend, at least give yourself the best chance possible, and don’t look like this:

Even an astronaut monkey wouldn’t touch that.

Given the choice, I think I’d take the monkey.

Moving On…
Yesterday I decided to begin a new quest. This is something that’s really been a couple of months overdue, but until yesterday I just never got the inspiration to actually get up and do it. My evening event at work got canceled, meaning I actually got my whole day off yesterday as it’s supposed to be. Since I had planned on going to work in the evening and then was suddenly freed from that task, I decided it was time to go on a photoshoot. I had just recently started to look at Ken Rockwell’s photography, and decided I would give his style a try. He’s a genius with color. In fact, he even claims he doesn’t shoot subjects in his photography, because his subject is the color. His pictures are all taken with good old-fashioned skill, meaning none of his colors are faked on photoshop. If you’re good enough, patient enough, and devoted enough, you can make pictures turn out like that without cheating.

And because I live reasonably close to salt water (Chesapeake Bay), I thought I’d use the opportunity to get away from the city, outside of the chaos and the power trips, and check out a random town on the bay. There were only a few close enough for me to get to and still have daylight, so I chose Chesapeake Beach, a town of about 2,000 people just 30 miles southeast of DC. I got there hoping to find a nice pier out over the water, something scenic and ready for my sunset photography. I mean come on, the town is called Chesapeake Beach. But alas, there is actually no beach in the very illegitimately-named Chesapeake Beach, and thus no scenic pier out over the water. But I didn’t let that stop me. I managed to find a spot that I thought was photoworthy, and began to snap pictures like a pro. Unfortunately, my camera is frustratingly limited in its capabilities, and I think I basically got 100 photos worth of trash (and all of the same thing). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great camera for your everyday photos and even artistic shots, so long as they’re in the daylight. But low-light times such as sunsets demand a lot of adjustments like long shutter times and aperture changes. And my camera, for the first second time in our relationship as camera and owner, failed me. I haven’t really spent the time to photoshop any of my pics yet, but here is what I’ve deemed the early winner:

Okay, I admit I photoshopped it a little. See that funky part on the far left? That’s where I screwed up and was too tired to fix it. Hey, I had to at least make the thing presentable.

Anyways, after the sun went down, I went to the only highly-recommended restaurant in town, Smokey Joe’s. And when you’re at a food joint on the bay, what are you most assuredly getting? Crab, of course. I opted for the crab cakes, and they were incredible. Expensive, but incredible. These things were packed with huge chunks of meat and a lot of it… I’m guessing six or seven crabs made the ultimate sacrifice for my meal last night. And let me just say that for that one fleeting hour I was completely satisfied with living on the east coast.

In my future, I see more Maryland town-hopping and much more crab eating, all in the name of good photography. Maybe someday I’ll actually take a good picture or two, and make a coffee table book. That’s the ultimate for all photographers, right? Coffee table stardom.

Mmmm, skinny boy decaf no-foam lattes.

There have honestly been very few times in my life where I’ve been this happy. We can talk about my priorities later–for now I’m just enjoying this.