"You'll fucking die!"

Picture this: I'm riding a darkened bus home tonight after work, slumped in a seat, half-asleep as usual. The MP3 player is on shuffle, and the Beach Boys' "I'm Waiting for the Day" is playing. The track comes softly to a close, and then I suddenly hear someone bellow, "You'll fucking die!"

Danger! Apparently a fight has broken out behind me, and someone's about to get a knife shoved into his guts in the latest of Toronto's sudden outbreak of stabbings. I have an instant, visceral fight-or-flight response: My eyes shoot wide open. Adrenaline floods my body. My testicles retract up into my belly.

Then I hear the would-be-murderer keep talking and realize he's coming through my headphones. It's Frank Black. The MP3 player has randomly called up that short track from the Pixies' Surfer Rosa where he shouts a violent threat and then has to spend about a minute convincing someone that he was only kidding around. False alarm.

I spend the next fifteen minutes feeling the epinephrine turn sour in my belly, feeling stupid, and thinking that if the unneeded adrenaline rush isn't the quintessential example of being all dressed up with nowhere to go, I don't know what is. Except for actually being all dressed up with nowhere to go, of course.