YOU KNOW HOW PEOPLE TALK about lightning strikes being the COOLEST THING EVER?

They have no idea what the hell they are talking about. I know because, before last night, I was one of those people.

---

I was working on the computer - late as usual, because when you run your own show and have clients to answer to, there's no such thing as a standard work schedule. It was around 10:30 p.m. My husband was yelling from the bedroom (where he was reading, ahem) that I needed to close shop and get to bed already - we had a big day tomorrow. But I was futzing around, uploading final photos to a client's fan page I'd created on Facebook and placing captions.... Once I'd done that, I planned to check all my own Facebook updates quickly, cruise OS super fast and clear my in-box before showering (flouting, as always, my mother's admonitions to never take a shower as a storm approaches). And I was almost... done... when...

VWWHAALLM! (Not "WHAM!" When God's fist hits the side of your house, WHAM is just not sufficient to the moment. God's fist has a lot more bass than you might think. WHAM just sounds like a tinny whimper by comparison.)

Right outside my office window, right before my eyes, the brightest light attended by such a deafening BOOM that it shook all the windows in my house and collapsed my lungs in an instant. The flash was so bright and the boom so loud I have no adequate way to describe it except to say I screamed a primordial scream of the ages at the top of my lungs lasting a full 30 seconds, at which point I finally figured out what happened. And that I was still here. And that my husband heard it too (so I wasn't asleep, or, you know, dead). And that it wasn't a BOMB. Because, in the heat of the moment, your brain isn't processing WHAT you're experiencing. Your brain moves immediately into FLIGHT MODE - and viscerally responds to millions of years of evolutionary survival instinct.

Once I stopped screaming, my brain seemed temporarily fried (along with, I learned a few minutes later, my permanently fried FiOS Internet unit and sump pump - perfectly timed in a Murphy's Law way just before the deluge). I sat at my desk blinking the blinks of a thousand blinkers, in a sort of shock, and then I found I just wanted to run into the basement and find a hole to crawl into. I didn't actually do that, but that's not the point. In a few moments, I came to myself... weather reports... approaching storm (there hadn't even been any rain or the rumbling of thunder before this happened, understand - it struck out of the blue).... My brain cells started firing up again. "You've been hit by lightning. Or your house or that tree out there was. YOU are OK." That's when I started breathing again and began checking the house for damages.

But actually, I wasn't OK. And, as I write this hours later, I am still not OK. This is not a normal experience. It's like a post-traumatic stress thing - remembering my immediate instinctive response, recalling all the times I laughed at lightning, which striketh trees in the far distance and smoteth remote parts of the earth I never see, and rarely targeteth people (usually the village idiots dancing in the rain or wretched souls featured on the news, as I have seen it), but hath been no threat to me.

Silly human. I am inarticulate and wholly incapable of describing the unfathomably raw power of a lightning strike you personally witness. It's unlike anything I have ever experienced and, trust me, if you've never been that close to a lightning strike, you never want to be. EVER. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER. It makes you feel infinitesimal, vulnerable, absurdly focused on the inane hubris of your completely ephemeral mortal life in a way that seems no less than a MESSAGE FROM GOD. You want to know why? Because it's real Old Testament wrath-of-God type stuff. Destruction in an instant. Finger of fate.

For the remainder of the storm, which lasted a couple of hours, I admit I physically flinched at every lightning flash. The smell of ozone was still fresh in my nose, filling my basement and my brain and making me worry not a little that the house had or would catch on fire. (It didn't.) Thank goodness almost every appliance I own is on a surge protector. (Although when Verizon hooked up my FiOS two years ago, they didn't tell me to get one for the unit. Who'd a thunk it? But I will now.... And KENT PITMAN here at OS reminded me I need to replace ALL my surge protectors - because that is what you're supposed to do if they did their job in order to keep your appliances protected next time. Thanks, Kent... You rock.)

My neighbors weren't so lucky, Vince the Verizon repair guy told me.... Everything they owned was toast. Can you imagine that.... (Note to yourselves: Buy the $5 surge protector. It's worth it.)

Here's my bottom line, and about the only thing I've walked away with (other than unexpected praise for Verizon's rapid repair response, and a new admiration for my husband's quirky and at times frustrating habit of never throwing anything away, such as our old sump pump - a move that saved our basement last night):

Sure, by light of day, when things are going my way, I can have my little life and blithely go through the motions of feeling I am in control of it all. Running my little business. Being in tight with several groups of friends. Feeling all good about my take on the world. How nice. Nicety nice nice nice.

And then something like this happens that puts a little of the fear of God in you. Not fear as in bogeyman under the bed, and not even actual fear of God - as in give me my heapin' helpin' of a big, transformative life with a lot of God on the side now, thank you. I mean FEAR as in awe of the miracles of the universe.

LIGHTNING IS ONE OF THEM.

So trust me.... If you, like me, think lightning is cool, that's cool. From a distance. Don't go hoping to encounter it. Don't go chasing it. Don't dance around in the rain, don't talk on a landline phone. Don't shower in it, just like Momma said. Don't avoid using surge protectors. But DO let OS or Facebook keep you delayed a few... seconds... longer - because hey, it could just save your life. Maybe that's an exaggeration. But you know something? Had I been showering, and had that strike happened at the same time given its proximity, we might have a different story here altogether.

I might be the idiot on the news today. Wouldn't THAT be the coolest thing ever... not.