On Wednesday night, in the midst of rush hour on the West Side Highway in Manhattan, while idling in the center lane, the traffic light turned green, and when I pressed the gas, my car did not move.

Instead, a message appeared on my screen, alerting me to a transmission problem.

I was on my way to The Moth in downtown Manhattan with my friends, Chris and Lionel.

This was an especially bad place for my car to break down, for many reasons.

Location. Timing. Distance from home.

Almost instantly, the car behind me began to honk.

“Hit the hazards,” Chris said from the backseat, but I was already moving to activate them.

Then something happened that never ceases to amaze me:

While I attempted to restart the car by turning it off and on, depressing the brake harder than normal, and attempting to shift into drive or even reverse, another part of my mind had already gone to work:

1. AAA will tow the car 100 miles. I’m about 90 miles from home, I think, so that can be taken care of relatively easily.
2. Should we push the car over to the bike lane if it won’t start? And could we with all this traffic?
3. Will a tow truck really drive from NYC to Connecticut with my car, only to turn around and head back alone? That can’t be a thing.
4. We will need to get home tonight. Lionel is catching a train and a plane tomorrow.
5. Who do I know in the city who could take care of my car if I can’t get that seemingly impossible tow?
6. We’ll go to Grand Central and catch a Metro-North to New Haven, then an Uber, or maybe Kaia or Elysha could pick us up there?
7. Wait. We could also take an Uber home. Could we?
8. I once sent a storyteller home to Brooklyn in an Uber, so yes, it’s possible. I’ve taken two-hour Uber rides from airports before.
9. It’ll probably cost us $300, so $100 each. Not nothing, but not too bad.
10. If we’re going to Uber home, does that mean we still go to The Moth?
11. I’ll need to drive Chris home from my house after we get back to Connecticut in Elysha’s car.
12. I’ll need Elysha’s car tomorrow, so I’ll drive her to school.
13. I should probably cancel my golf lesson.
14. Actually, Lionel is staying at that hotel in Farmington so that it would be a two-stop Uber ride.
15. Metro-North is probably a better option if trains are still running to New Haven.
16. Charlie would know. Call him.
17. I’m not sitting in the front seat of the Uber if we take one home.

All of those thoughts, and probably more that I’ve since forgetten, flooded my mind in the 30 seconds it took me to turn off my car, restart it, attempt to shift into drive, register that the lights on my transmission buttons were out, turn the car off again, turn it back on again, read the warning message on my display a second time, slam down hard on the brake, try the transmission buttons again, turn the car off a third time, turn it back on again, and slam down on the brake again, which finally caused the lights on my transmission to return and produced a blinking P on my display.

Then I pressed D for drive, which replaced the blinking P with a blinking D and a new message warning me to avoid sudden stops and starts and to bring my car into a certified dealer as soon as possible for diagnosis and repair.

But we were moving, so I was happy.

We parked the car in a garage at the bottom of the island, hoping that it would start and drive again when we returned, then we walked for about three minutes through the financial district before coming to Conwell Cafe — a bank-turned restaurant and event space that was one of the most beautiful places for a Moth StorySLAM ever.

The evening was otherwise uneventful. It was Lionel’s first time at a StorySLAM, so although his name remained stubbornly in the bag, he had the chance to experience something he had heard about often. My name was pulled second from the bag, which is incredibly annoying, and I was winning at intermission, but I ultimately finished third, which was also annoying.

But the car ran just fine all the way home, and a trip to the dealer two days later revealed no problems at all.

Go figure.

But the astounding part, at least to me:

It’s remarkable how quickly the human mind can work, especially under those conditions. Stalled in one of the worst places on the planet, with cars honking at me and Chris and Lionel firing off suggestions, part of my mind went to work, calmly trying to determine the next best course of action, while another part was still troubleshooting the problem at hand.

One part of my mind was trying to restart the car, while another was flipping through a list of ideas for how to proceed if it didn’t start, going so far as to determine that I would not be the one required to sit up front with the Uber driver if that was our ultimate course of action.

The human mind is a remarkable thing, capable of so much in such a short period of time.

Artificial intelligence is quite powerful, but the human brain is pretty powerful, too, especially when the pressure is high, the inputs are many, and the clock is ticking.

I’m not sure if Claude would’ve done any better that night.