It wasn’t 10 minutes after leaving Beth’s place that she called my phone to tell me something about a meteor shower going down at 1 in the morning. Having just seen the trailer for 2012 and viewed the disaster film “Confessions of a Shopaholic” earlier that night, I made a sharp U-turn in the middle of Imperial highway and sped back to her place. I knew we didn’t have much time. Seeing a fruit cart parked alongside the road I quickly drove directly through it while glancing at my watch and yelling “HANG ON!,” “GET DOWN!” and “WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME!” to no one in particular.

Upon my arrival Beth informed me that apparently meteor showers happen pretty frequently and don’t always result in the extinction of all human life. I replied by saying, “That’s exactly what they want you to think,” while filling buckets with clean drinking water. “We’ll have to take Georgie Fruit with us,” I continued, as I glanced to see him licking himself in the litter box. If the situation got really desperate we could use him for food … and it was already a desperate situation. Beth calmed me down by explaining that most meteors in a shower are hardly ever bigger than a grain of sand, and went on to lighten the mood by explaining that stars themselves are giant gassy balls.

Knowing I had nothing to worry about, we took a trip to the local park to stargaze. Although I seemed set on lying down in the mud, Beth meanwhile managed to find a nice patch of grass for us to share. “Wow!” I exclaimed as I relished the majesty of the universe. “These are the biggest meteors I’ve ever seen!”

“Those are airplanes,” Beth explained.

“Oh, but look! That constellation is moving!”

“That’s a helicopter.”

“Ah, I see,” I concluded. The universe, I was discovering, is filled with mystery and intrigue. What could at one moment be the Milky Way may at the next be car exhaust, and what could at once be the sound of a distant traveller from another world be also the sound of my stomach attempting to digest a 7-Eleven chili dog and losing the battle to potentially disastrous results.

Turning my head towards Beth, I began asking the profound question of “Do you ever think that-”

“Look a meteor!” she yelled.

“Dang it!,” I exclaimed. Realizing that I missed it and also forgot my question.

My dad and I used to go stargazing every summer at the beach and watch falling stars graze over the ocean. We would wait minutes at a time for a fleeting streak of white that would often be so slight that I probably imagined it, and usually did. It was nice sharing a similar moment with Beth, with both of us reclined back and wondering if the meteor shower was about to start, had just ended or was going on behind a thick veil of pollution.

“Are meteor showers usually this lame?,” she asked.

My chance to respond with a “Yes, probably,” was cut short by a blinding streak of white in the sky that seemed to leave a vague scar hanging in the air for several moments before fading away into a blue mist. With our jaws hanging open we both released loud gasps.

Looking at each other, Beth effectively summarized our situation by saying “We just got pwned by the meteor shower.”

I don’t think even the dinosaurs could have said it better.