It Sounded Like a Freight Train

You know what's more awesome than your power being out for over 40 hours? When you're falling asleep listening to your iPod -- "Let's Hear It For the Boy" by Deniece Williams, in particular -- because you need some background noise because the fan you usually have next to your bed for white noise runs on electricity, which, for some reason ComEd refuses to turn back on until all of your perishable food has, well, perished, and you are startled awake by a thunderous crash that lasts for several seconds -- which is not to be confused with the thunder-laden brawl between Thor and Zeus that took place outside your window for four hours straight the night before, thus preventing you from falling asleep until after one a.m. -- and you're freaked out because, honestly, what the fuck could that have been, so you pop out of bed and ask out loud, twice, "what the fuck was that?," and your wife doesn't know because she thought it was thunder, so you stand in the doorway to your dark bedroom flashing a small flashlight down your hallway waiting for something to happen, but nothing does, so you whistle for your dog, and she comes down the hallway into your bedroom with no visible scars, but you're still a little freaked out because that was a really big crash you heard, and you're thinking to yourself, "why the fuck don't I own ninja stars?," because all you have is a really small flashlight and very limited martial arts training, and you assume whoever caused the thunderous crash is larger, quicker, better trained, and more heavily armed than you, but you decided to slowly enter the hallway anyway, first taking a look at the second bedroom next to your bedroom, where you find six Ikea Benno CD towers -- each almost seven-feet tall -- which had been lined up against the back wall of the second bedroom (and hooked to each other) and, more importantly, formerly housed your more-than-600 CDs and tapes, strewn about the room, along with, more importantly, your more-than-600 CDs and tapes, many of which were injured badly in the fall, and you're actually more pissed off that this was the cause of the crash, rather than an armed, well-trained, large, quick cat burglar, because, while you're glad that your limited edition Def Leppard Union Jack guitar -- which you have played approximately twice because you have no idea how to play the guitar except for the first six notes to "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica -- appeared unscathed, you will be forced to clean this up and, because you're extremely anal about your CDs and tapes, realphabetize everything and put them back on the shelves, this time, however, making sure to use those trusty brackets Ikea includes to fasten your Benno shelves to the wall that you should have used when you put the shelves up in the first place in order to ensure that you weren't violently awakened at 11:09 p.m. on a Tuesday when the power was out only to find 25 years worth of music on the floor out of alphabetical order, and it takes you another hour to fall asleep because your heart is still racing and then you start to think to yourself, "I didn't even look in the bathroom across the hall from the second bedroom, so that giant, deft marksman could have knocked down my CDs when he tried to reach for that OMC CD that was ironically the first CD I saw on the floor, and then hid because the noise was so loud, and now that mothertrucker is sneaking through my house and he's probably going to take my laptop, which would blow," so you manage to convince yourself as you're falling asleep that you're pretty sure you should get some ninja stars, or at least it would be nice for the power to be restored so your fan can block out any future burgling-related or non-burgling-related noises.