Twelve years ago this morning at 0119 I was hit by a man driving a white pickup truck. That much I know from what I remember of before and immediately after the wreck. What I know from what I learned later is the white pickup was a city vehicle and the driver had made a u-turn to get on my side of the road and pretty much floored it to hit me as fast as he could, and that this was the same driver of a white pickup truck that shouted at me to “get off the fucking road” before I got hit.
I have recounted my injuries in brief and at length in other posts in this blog, in fact there are 2 pages devoted to those injuries, one serious and one humorous. I have also waxed at length about the consequences of those injuries, so that is why I’m not talking about them here. They hurt, they still hurt from time to time, and they changed my life. That is enough about my injuries.
On the runup to this day I was confronted by a large number of coincidences from other people whose lives have been changed by motor vehicle wrecks. Their stories are very similar to mine in most respects, differing only in details that revolve around the different injuries they we got. The hospital stays were very similar, the painful PT was very similar, and the psychological recovery was very similar. Then I started getting stories about soldiers wounded in battle, and saw the same thing from them, down to the problems of recovering from brain injury, and the stigma of not being able to think the same as before the injury because brain injuries normally don’t leave scars. You can’t look at someone and say, “I should be careful with them as they have a damaged brain.”
What I wanted to emphasize in today’s post is that life is for living. Living is not eking out survival but in experiencing as much as you can. In some religions it is said that God created man that He might experience His Creation, others state pretty much the same thing about sentience, we exist that the Universe might experience Itself. All I Know is I am here to live my life to the best of my abilities, to experience as much Life as I can before I can’t any more. Tonight I’m going to a party to celebrate the fact that “I’m not dead, yet” and have my Warlock6 kick some ass fighting political corruption in whatever the name is of the town we are in at the moment, a three-way struggle between the Royals, the Priests, and the Mage Guild. As a magic user my character tends towards supporting the Mages but as I have a Good alignment (Chaotic Good, but still Good) I am ambivalent about all the parties involved in the confrontation. My deity is one that likes to puncture the dignity of the officious and the pompous because that is funny, so the other two parties in the conflict are both “fair game” from those teachings. Also my party (in-game party, not the party IRL to celebrate not being dead) has 3 stage props from one of our performances, the Exploding Radish. I was tending the garden of magical vegetables when the bard came to keep me up to date on the news of the party so I pulled 3 ripe radishes for her. These are the equivalent of a “flash-bang” stage prop and are (mostly) harmless but might be useful as a distraction at some point in the future.
So, anyway, I’m going to go to my party in a bit. Y’all kick back and have a cold one of your preference for me, and remember to kiss your significant others, hug your kids, and remember that live is for living. Tomorrow I’m going to attend my grandson’s first birthday, which as Mrs. the Poet points out is something else I managed to live long enough to experience. I’ll be back Monday (yes I work on holidays).
PSA, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 