Un-thinking

Have you ever had a though that you know is just going to tempt fate or is just plain wrong and then spent a few minutes wishing you hadn’t thought it before trying to blot it out and erase it from your mind completely? What an odd thing to try and do. It happens to me all the time.

I often see people stopped in a really inconvenient place on the roadside causing traffic chaos and what’s the first thing that goes through my mind?

“I hope you’ve broken down!”

It’s not that I actually wish for somebody to break down, it’s just that I’m hoping that they haven’t stopped there simply to answer the phone or have a bar of chocolate. So the sentiment I’m trying to get at is, “I hope you haven’t just stopped there.” but again, that implies that I’m hoping they’ve stopped due to some incalculably expensive mechanical failure with their car.

Now drowning in guilt for having somehow worsened their plight simply by commenting on it, I try and erase the evil thought (and the unfortunate driver) from my mind. Too late though, I’ve had the thought now! Damn this is complex! But that’s only the beginning, it gets worse from now on.

Having wished a breakdown on the hapless road user, you now begin to fear your own breakdown must be imminent; that is sod’s law after all. Frantically you try and un-think the “I hope you’ve broken down!” comment, but you just can’t do it, it’s too late, the thought is on the loose.

Shit, shit, shit!

Praise be on high when you safely reach your destination free from mechanical woe for another day. It makes you wonder whether other more important thoughts have just slipped out before a round of frantic un-thinking?

“Bush? Yep, I’ll vote for him.” or going back in time (but sticking with the theme), “Hey George, you should stand for election.” or (still with the theme here), “Hey honey, how about we start a family. If we had a son we could call him George too.”

Now do you see how dangerous thinking can be? If only we could un-think.

This entry was posted on 20/06/2007 at 08:19 am and is filed under Random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.