Look Out, 'Cause Here It Comes

I remember when I woke up with a start the first time I felt an earthquake. I had only lived in California for a few months, and I was unprepared for the experience. I woke up my then wife-to-be who assured me without opening her eyes that it was no big deal: "The closet's just shaking." The closet and most everything else around me.
And then it was over. Each time the ground beneath my feet has shifted it has become a little easier to accept. I know where the fault lies, and though I know there is nothing I can do to correct it, I have made it my concern. Not in a big way, mind you, but it's a good thing to be familiar with the forces of nature just in case you need to negotiate with them.
That's why I feel so embarrassed by the asteroid that narrowly missed us last week. It was as big as an aircraft carrier, and it came as close as anything like it to crashing into our planet in the past thirty-five years. Unless you count all those bits of space debris that continues to drop out of the heavens because we forgot about them after they stopped doing their satellite duties. Or unless you think that two hundred thousand miles shouldn't qualify for "near miss."
Okay, maybe it's not something that Morgan Freeman should be disturbed for, or for which we need to enlist Bruce Willis' aid. It wasn't a big enough deal to construct a space ark or generate international cooperation to ward off the impending doom. It was as if our galactic closet was shaking. Now we can all go back to sleep.