Have you ever done something so dumb, so incredibly off-the-wall, that you have to ask yourself, “What was I thinking?”

The other night, I was driving home from a friend’s house, when I heard a loud bang from (I thought) the back of my car.

“There goes the alignment I just had done,” I thought. And drove on my merry way. I thought I’d run over something, like a chunk of concrete. Oh well.

I drove on for a couple of blocks, noticing the car was pulling harder to the right by the second. Then I heard the sickening “ka-bump, ka-bump” sound of a flat tire.

I pulled into the nearest driveway (Hi, folks!) and got out to take a look. Nothing wrong in the back. But the right passenger-side tire was flatter’n a flitter. And the rim looked scraped and bent, too.

At that moment, I asked myself, “What the heck did I do? What was I thinking? Was I thinking at all? How could I have done something that severe and not really paid attention?”

I do not know what I did to flatten the (brand-new) tire and crunch the rim. All I know is, I had to pay $65 for a new/used wheel and $18 to get a new, Road-Hazard-Protected tire put on.

But I’ve pondered this the last couple of days. How could I (a) not know what I’d done; and (b) not have stopped immediately after that big bang?

I know what I was thinking: nothing, nada, zip. Duh.

Sometimes in life, we are going along on our way, and BANG! something shocking happens. But we go brain-dead. We go on, whistling, unconscious, happy and ignorant. But for me, no more of that.

Just today, I became aware of a big bumping and thumping going on somewhere at the back of my house. Heck, in this neighborhood, someone’s always using some big, noisy machine. I thought, “Oh, it’ll stop in awhile.” It kept on, and having just reminded myself (above) to take note of noises, I got up and looked out the back door. There was a squirrel hanging on a screen on the porch. Jumping from one screen to the other, panicked, unable to remember how he got in. I took a photo of him clinging to the corner. In a minute, he noticed the hole where he’d entered and quickly exited.

If I’d ignored that noise, I would have missed the sight. A once-in-a-lifetime look at a squirrel hanging from a screen. Wow. Note to myself: It pays to stay awake.