The Sky is Falling!

I went downtown yesterday and found it full of police cars and a firetruck and a crowd of people looking up at one of Regina's very few skyscrapers. My first thought was that someone was going to jump, but before I could worry about that for too long a lady yelled at me, "THERE'S GLASS FALLING FROM THE SKY!"

I looked up.

That's not a great instinct, is it? Apparently I have not one ounce of self-preservation.

But the crowd of people was acting very casual. Even the lady who yelled at me wasn't frantic; it felt more like she just wanted to be the one to tell people, like it made her feel important to be the one spreading the news, and I thought, fair enough. It's fun to get to be the one to tell people stuff, and how much more when that stuff is really important? Like, "The sky is falling!"? Chicken Little knows. There's a reason that story is an enduring classic; it's so relatable. 

All this to say, no one seemed worried, so I wasn't worried either. Like, if there was glass falling from the sky in an actively harmful way, wouldn't everyone be running for cover? Screaming? Shielding themselves with their jackets and backpacks and significant others? But everyone was just staring upward, eyes and mouths open, like they wanted to be showered in glass from the heavens. 

It's times like this when you really understand that people, at the very core of their being, think they're invincible. Like, none of us would ever say it it like that, but we do. We say, "See you later," as we leave our friends without considering that it's entirely possible we might not see them later. We do risky things all day every day without a care in the world. We hear there's glass raining from the sky and we look up.

We are so silly!

Anyway, I walked on. (I saw on Instagram later that a pane of glass from high up on one of the towers had blown out, or something. I hope it didn't hit anyone.)

I was listening to music in my headphones as I walked, and I was at the part in Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand, about 60 seconds in, where there's a bell ringing in the background, and I suddenly became aware that the bell was not only in my headphones but also outside of my headphones. I paused the music and looked around and, sure enough, there was a man standing nearby with a bell, ringing it over and over again, only slightly off-time with the one in the song. It was odd, to feel as though whoever was ringing the bell in the song had climbed out into my real life, standing right there in front of me. He was also yelling, at the top of his lungs, "JESUS LOVES YOU! JESUS LOVES YOU! JESUS LOVES YOU!" He had literature to hand out.

Everyone around the man was ducking and trying to avoid eye contact with him, and I starting laughing to myself as I hurried past. I was thinking, this is probably what we all should've done when there was glass raining from the sky. We're not afraid of dying, as a society, because we don't actually think we will, but we are terrified of Jehovah's Witnesses.