Charon, that dark chariot of death, once again darkens our driveway. The car that tried to kill us by blowing out a tire and brakes while moving at a fast speed and left us stranded in the high-velocity HOV lane for a harrowing 25 minutes, has been repaired and is now sitting back in the driveway.
It's almost as if the car wants us dead. Some eighteen months ago, in a morbid sort of thought experiment, we fantasized about the various ways which, if we were so inclined (which we weren't then and aren't now), we might commit suicide. For some reason, all of them involved our car, so we decided to name it Charon for the ferryman in Greek mythology who transported the dead to the underworld.
Speaking of Greek mythology, we learned while playing the Hellenistic video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey that the ancient Greeks thought that when one sneezed, it was an omen from the gods. A sneeze is an involuntary action, and since you didn't initiate it, it must have been the gods that did. We haven't played long enough yet to learn what the Greeks thought about other bodily functions, such as hiccups, burps, and farts. Burps and farts seem to us to be due more to what and how we ate - eating too fast might produce a burp and eating beans famously results in the other bodily function. But hiccups seem to us to be particularly supernatural - a bad case of hiccups feels more like a curse, some sort of demonic possession, than a consequence of improper dietary actions.
But anyway, the Greeks, at least with regard to sneezing, considered the involuntary reaction to be something initiated by the gods. Many indigenous religions hold anything that can't be explained by their primitive understanding of nature to the actions of supernatural beings - thunder and lightning, the phases of the moon, infant mortality, rainbows, earthquakes, etc. I understand (or more likely, misunderstand) that Shinto, the native religion of Japanese, is almost entirely about unexplained phenomena - anything out of the ordinary, anything weird, falls under the provenance of Shinto.
So it interests us that many people, upon hearing about our adventures in the HOV lane on Monday night, tell us that we weren't hit or killed because god or a guardian angel or some other divine being must have been watching out for us. It couldn't have been mere luck - the statistical probability that, say, only 1 out of 100 cars wouldn't have been able to get out of our way in time meant that we would survive for some limited time (apparently at least 25 minutes) before getting struck. No, it can't be explained away and rationalized so easily, so some ascribe our survival to the will of the gods, just like a Greek ascribed a sneeze, or a Bushman a thunderbolt, or a Shinto priest a strange dream.
But the amusing part is that while they assert that our survival had to have been divinely ordained, the fact that our tire suddenly and unexpectedly just blew out was merely happenstance, shit luck, one of those things that just happens. It couldn't be that god blew out our tire to punish us or teach us or to simply scare the living shit out of us. That part was just bad luck. Or auto mechanics. God only gets invoked to explain why we weren't killed, not why we were almost killed.
Maybe god simply didn't like us anymore, had enough of us and was trying to kill us, and, incompetent old doddard that he is, failed even at that simple task. He blew out a tire, directed a chunk of the rubber to fly off and rupture the brake line, but then couldn't distract any oncoming motorists enough to not notice us and collide with our disabled vehicle. Maybe god's just a sick bastard and, bored out of his eternal mind, simply wanted to mess with us just to see what would happen.
No, no one ever supposes that (at least not out loud, at least not to us). They can look at half the incident and see science and mechanics and probability, but those are all forgotten in the second half and the supernatural gets invoked.
We find that interesting. People are strange.
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