When I got home last night, it was a typical calm summer night; balmy but otherwise ordinary.  But something extra-ordinary happened on the short journey between the lobby and my third floor apartment...
 
When I arrived at my door I heard a loud roaring sound bellowing from within.  For a second, I thought that my living room was on fire, yet there was no smoke or heat emanating from the source of noise.  I turned the key to my lock, oxymoronically prepared for a surprise.  Yet the door would not open.  The horrible groaning and the refusal of the door to give way led me to consider that perhaps a powerful poltergeist had evicted me.  I remembered that in an attempt to come home to a cool room, I had left my “windows”¹ open.  In the one minute while I was on the elevator, a downburst had occurred outside and created a vacuum within so powerful that I couldn't push the door against it.  The age-old dilemma of Man vs. Nature had reared its familiar face--and it was a brutal countenance.  However, Mike Holden himself is in fact the most powerful force of the Universe (it was a photo finish with nuclear bonding).  I rotated the knob and threw my shoulder into the door the way I'd seen police break them down in so many movies before.  When the door gave way and the pressure released, I entered to find...almost nothing wrong.  A light bulb blew out when I flicked the switch and the rest of them put on an impromptu light show with their slowly pulsating dimming and brightening, but other than that and a piece paper on the floor, my apartment had slipped through the fingers of the Hand of God.
 
It was only a few minutes after I got home that the full brunt of the onslaught came.  The blitzkrieg left as quickly as it appeared, but not without leaving a total wave of destruction in its path.  The sidewalks leading to the train station that I walk each morning were littered with thick tree limbs that had been ripped from their torsos in the storm's furious rage.  One mighty soldier in my parking lot was completely felled, crushing the souls (and everything else) of a few cars underneath.  When I finally arrived at the station, I was greeted with an announcement that the engines were running up to 1 - 2 hours behind due to the previous evening's inclimate weather.  Wouldn't you know it, today was the day I left my phone and blackberry at home, leaving me with no way to inform employer of my impending tardiness.  After an hour and a half waiting in the warm concrete train station, with nary a train passing by to provide cool relief, I decided to go home and call it a sick day.
 
Have fun at work today, suckers.  I'll try not to get a sunburn.

Footnote:

1.  My apartment has floor to ceiling windows, so they don't actually open, presumably so people don't regularly jump out of them.  For fresh air, they've provided large vents underneath the actual glass.

I've always said that I wished I had a stalker and then this:

A friend forwarded the above Myspace profile to me that I didn't know existed.  Unfortunately, the profile is set to private so I can't check out the friends to try to figure out who the author is.  My friends keep trying to accuse each other of being the site's owner, but I'm skeptical: 

A.  They would have chosen a less flattering picture and

B.  Would have made it public for more effective mockery

I'm not on Myspace myself, so I can't even be a friend to all my own worshippers.  I tried enlisting my cohorts to send friend requests to get in and then inform me of what's on the other side, but none of them have been able to infiltrate it yet.  If any of you would like to visit my temple and lay an offering at my feet, be sure to visit:  http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=128817032

P.S.  The creepiest thing about that page is that ghost kid in the ad looks a lot like me.