Good evening! How is everybody? I’m fine, mostly, now. But things weren’t always this good. In fact 11 years ago I was dead!
People hear me say this and some of them are like “Dude! What’s it like to be dead, man?” Well the guy that met me said the first thing I would have to do is become one with infinity, which is like meditating. So I did this for couple of minutes and said “OK, now what?” and the guy said “There is no ‘Now what’, there’s becoming one with infinity from here on out”. And I said “OH HEEEELLL No!” and came back.
Now they guy that killed me (What you thought I just up and died all on my own, without any “assistance” from others?), well he had a problem. Actually he had several problems but he specifically had a problem with me. More specifically he had a problem with the way I got around when the buses stopped running. I ride a bike. Not a motorcycle, one of those things that require using your muscllllles to get places. I started riding my bike because I had a bike and I didn’t have any money when I started this job 3 towns over, so I rode the bus there with my bike and then rode the bike home after the buses stopped running. After a while I decided I liked riding my bike more than I liked driving so I would save the money I would have used to buy gas and a car for other things like paying the mortgage and other bills and just buy a bus pass and more food.
Did I mention I love food? Oh yes I lOOooove food. I used to manage a restaurant for this guy, that insisted I had to eat either a pizza or a pasta entre every shift. The problem here was I worked 2 shifts a day 6 days a week, and that’s a lot of pizza and pasta that I had to eat all by myself. I went from 170 pounds of skin and mostly bones to 240 in about 6 months, because when I wasn’t eating pizza I was in the car delivering pizza, to the tune of about 200 miles a night on my car. I also had to keep herd over 5 or 6 other drivers and make sure they didn’t speed or park illegally because that would reflect badly on the restaurant. We stayed busy at that restaurant right up until the bookkeeper ran off to Bermuda with the payroll, and my last 2 paychecks bounced. So yeah, I can put away a lot of food.
So, here I was riding my bike, remember the bike? Here I was riding my bike home from work in the dark in the rain and I have headlights and blinky lights and reflective ankle bands and a huge bike reflector on the back of the bike, and I have to slow down because I can’t see to ride between the water falling from the sky and the mud coming off the front tire, and this redneck driving a white pickup truck decides I don’t belong on any road he ever drives on and tells me to get out of the (fornicating) road. From the opposite side of the road going the other direction. Since this is the only through route between where I worked 3 towns over and where I live and the sidewalk begins and ends in about 50 feet, I ignore him and continue at my 13.5 MPH pace that is as fast as I can go and still be able to see where I’m going. Rain and mud, remember?
Well Mr. Red Neck gets so incensed I didn’t immediately bunnyhop my bike over an 8 inch curb onto a muddy field that he decides to use the first cut-through in the median he gets to and do a u-turn to come back and “discuss” it with me. As he approaches my spot on the road doing about 60 MPH I hear him screaming about getting off the (fornicating) road and then he hits me from behind after accelerating with his foot planted firmly to the floor for about a quarter mile after the u-turn. I didn’t say this was an especially fast truck, just an exceptionally stupid and angry driver. So, I hear the screaming and then nothing, and then I’m becoming one with infinity for about 2 minutes. While I was becoming one with infinity my body was doing an exceptional imitation of a rag doll that has been caught in a toddler’s tantrum after I bounce off the front end and windshield of the truck. I sail high enough into the air that at least one witness was able to get out her phone and dial 9 and 1 between the time she saw me come over the roof of the truck and my landing face-first on the road behind the truck. Now that’s some serious hang time, the kind that NFL punters dream about.
Incidentally this was the third pickup truck that was totalled out after hitting me. I was hit twice by different trucks crossing the street in the same intersection. Idiots trying to run the red light to make a left turn. I never understood that, and I really never understood why they totalled out those trucks when I was just bruised up, but I did understand why they would have to total out the truck that hit me, because I caved the roof in and bent the windshield frame so bad that the only way to make it drivable would be to cut the entire roof away and make a roadster out of it.
Anyway, there I was, dead to the world, literally. And as I said after about 2 minutes of no pulse or respiration I decided becoming one with infinity for infinity was not my current bag of tea leaves and came back and rebooted everything. I’m still trying to decide if that was a good idea or a mistake. So, after I come back someone decides to get me off the road, and I realize that I’m seriously messed up on my left side, to the point that the “dead guy” says that he has a broken upper femur to the people trying to move him, several times in a row as loud as he can. Now how loud that was I will never know, but it was loud enough to let them know the “dead guy” wasn’t dead (yet) [/Monty Python Voice] Then I woke up again inside the ambulance in the middle of the punchline to a joke that I had been telling for at least a couple of minutes, so my wife’s assertion that I’ll do a monologue as the headliner at my own funeral may not be too far off.
The trip to the hospital was not much fun as there were numerous railroad crossings that jostled me so bad I had to pee it hurt so bad, and then it reeeeaaaaaalllyyyyy hurt because everything “down there” had been messed up by the bike seat getting shoved through my crotch by a truck doing 60 MPH while I was sitting on that seat. At first they thought I had broken my pelvis things were so messed up “down there”. I got to spend the next week urinating through a tube stuck in my bladder because of how messed up “down there” was.
But getting back to the guy that killed me, I’m still trying to figure out “Why?”. Why did he get so angry at me riding the other way on the other side of the road that he had to stop and come back to hit me? All I was doing was trying to get home from work, I wasn’t even in his way and had he just kept on going I would have been out of sight in a few seconds. I don’t think I was quite that ugly.
Thank you for listening. Tip the brisket and try your waitress.
Witch on a Bicycle 