I watched the last few minutes of an episode of Homicide: Life On The Streets today after I got home early from work. Normally, I don’t watch shows like that, but I wanted to sit back and eat lunch and relax and watch something mindless, so I was flipping channels and saw Vincent D’Onfrio, so I originally through it was an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but I soon discovered it wasn’t when I saw that his character was trapped between a subway train and the wall.

I had to read the plot summary after it was over because I missed so much, but it turns out that they had taken the urban legend about the person who gets crushed and the force of the object crushing him is the only thing keeping him alive, so when they remove him, he will die immediately. In the oft-told legend, the victim calls for his wife/girlfriend and has a chance to say his last goodbyes and then they remove the crushing object, thus killing him instantly. On this episode, however, the carrier didn’t know that he would surely die, and the detectives had to keep up a charade, pretending that he would be rushed to the hospital and would then be okay, all the while knowing that the rescue workers were undertaking a body removal, rather than a rescue. At the end, after the victim dies and his body is taken away in an ambulance, his girlfriend, whom some other detectives had been searching for throughout the episode so that she could get there, jogs through the rescue workers, totally unaware that such a horrific event had happened.

Maybe it’s still the hormones, but this disturbed me greatly. I know full well that the entire concept is faulty and nothing more than an urban legend, but the thought of being in a situation and knowing that I was going to die at the end made me feel so uneasy. And it made me feel even worse for people who really were in situations such as that, in the World Trade Center, the Tsunami, and countless other situations. I wept for those people.

Something I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that I have much less ability to handle things that disturb me. When I was in college, I enjoyed watching movies with disturbing concepts or reading books of the same ilk…they made me think about things that I wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. After living a little bit longer and seeing that those things are far more likely to happen and are a possibility, I want to run as far away as possible and keep them from my mind. I start to obsess over them and worry.

Anyway….just some thoughts I’m having. I can’t wait to forget about that show. Joey will be home soon and we’ll have a nice night of Chinese food and KNITTING!