Complex Numbers

Rocket Science

It's embarrassing how terrible my memory is for some things.

PROMPT May 24th

Write about something awkward or embarrassing that happened in public - it can be something that happened to you, or something you witnessed happen to somebody else. How did they react?

You know, just yesterday I was taking a nap when I woke up in a cold sweat thinking, "Gosh, I hope the 30DBC doesn't do the whole 'most embarrassing moment' prompt. I really hate those."

Well, this isn't quite that, but it's close enough to make me believe in precognition. Okay, no, not really.

Thing is, I'm sure I've had embarrassing or awkward moments. I must have, right? Everyone does. I have memories of lying awake at night replaying the moments again and again, but I have no memory of the actual moments. Does that make sense? Like, I remember the process by which I edit them out of my memory, but not the actual events because I edited them out.

A memory of such an event can and does pop out eventually, usually right when I don't want it to, and certainly not on demand for prompts like these. After wallowing in the embarrassment, I promptly forget about the event again. Drinking helps.

Similarly, I cringe when something like that happens to someone else. I guess I have some empathy after all, because I don't laugh or bond with other people over how silly the one it happened to is; I just wince and put myself in their place, and then edit it out of my memory.

Even if I could manage to dredge something up, I will have no way of knowing if it was something that actually happened, or something I saw in a movie or TV show.

I could, of course, just make something up, but that would be cheating. Okay, I've made stuff up for these prompts before, but usually only for obvious comedic effect and then I switch to the truth. But in this case, the truth is elusive.

Oh, good, I knew if I typed long enough I'd manage to come up with something. I'm not sure if it's "public," but it happened outdoors and there were people around. When I was a teen, I built and launched model rockets (I still build them sometimes). Some people, kids and parents, came over, for some reason, to witness a launch. Now, the way this is supposed to work, generally, is that the rocket flies up, a parachute ejects, and it floats back to the ground. I'd been talking up how it's safe and fun, and I had I don't know how many people watching when I launched a rocket; it went up, the parachute completely failed to eject, and the rocket buried itself nose-first in the dirt, narrowly missing a human.

Parents herded their children away from me very quickly (an activity I would get used to), and I kept launching rockets. That was probably the only time in my entire rocket science career that an ejection ever failed. Figures it was the one time I was trying to impress people.