Best of B3ta QOTW

Woo-hoo! My story was chosen to be among the 'best' ones on B3ta's Question of the Week (QOTW)! I've been having a hard time breaking through to the 'best' page, because the Website caters to fairly-juvenile British humor, for which I'm not particularly well-suited by background or temperament. B3ta tends to prefer stories about nasty, humilating, permanent traumas. I succeeded only once before, with "My Knife," in response to QOTW "What have you lost lately?" But even though I start with a disadvantage compared to young, careless, impulsive, heavy-drinking, accident-prone Britons, a good story is a good story, and that makes the competition fun.

This week's QOTW was:

There you are innocently going about your day when suddenly a particular song transports you back to a specific time and place. For me, Animotion's Obssession instantly brings back the fear and nerves of school exams. And you? Tell us all about it.

My response was:

Clocks
I was playing Coldplay's "Clocks" while driving into a California sunset in September 2002, when I saw a strange contrail rapidly heading west into the sunset. First time I ever saw such a thing: a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile heading from Vandenburg Air Force Base to Kwajalein Atoll, many thousands of miles away in the Pacific.

The missile was many hundreds of miles away, but with good visibility in the gloaming, it was possible to see the rocket stage. The contrail changed from dense smoke into a translucent glimmering perfect cone, as the upper stages of the missile ripped into the mesosphere. It was gorgeous and scary at the same time.

When I hear "Clocks", I sense nuclear annihilation is near and my time on this Earth is over.