Rantings Diversified

So many folks have asked me about the picture I use as my header that I decided to let you all know the story behind that car.

It started like any other lazy Sunday. I got up and just kinda’ putzed around the house. It was one of those days where it was trying to rain all day but just couldn’t muster enough to actually form real rain drops. The call came around 1130. I hadn’t spoken to him since returning from Dallas. He said he was on his way over. Cool beans we’ll do some web surfing and hopefully he’ll show me some new and wonderful piece of software or maybe even intro me to a new band.
He shows up a little after noon. I offer him a beer. He accepts so I say WTF I’ll have one too. We spent the early afternoon going over the new version of Paragon Hard Drive Manager. I guess it was about 2ish when we decided to GTFO and head over towards his place. I wanted to go eat at “Lagerville”, the local American Legion by his house. It has a great kitchen. I had visions of a wimpy burger basket. Imagine a bunch of white castle sized burgers served on top of a basket of fries. The burgers and fries are home made. Good eats. So we get to his place have a beer or two and we decide to drive over to his Xgirlfriends’ house to pickup some more of his stuff. In hindsight….bad idea.
We hop into the ’04 Mazda 3 5-door. Nice car, fast and it handles incredibly well since he got his go fast tires, vented brakes and new wheels. We start heading down those back country farm roads in Northern York County. I’m guessing it was about 1630. Well Alkaline Trio is on the stereo and we are carving up those twisty back roads when we came upon a tight turn. He throws it into it and sort of slides into a field. Oops! Hey time to chill dude, I said laughingly. He did. Then we came upon that turn. Well apparently he had not chilled as much as I thought he did because we went into that left hand turn who knows how fast.
I remember seeing the telephone pole coming straight at us quickly and thinking to myself, it’s not wavering. It’s not moving out of the way. I vividly remember that the telephone pole was coming straight at us. I leaned down to my left and then the world went all higgledy piggledy. At one point I opened my eyes just in time to see the cigarette lighter launch itself out of its home in the dashboard and fly right past my head. The whole world had a glittery feel to it. I can only figure that was broken glass flying through the air. I heard a lot of crashing and crunching noises and could feel that we were no longer going straight. I closed my eyes again. The next thing I knew I could feel that we were no longer moving and I opened my eyes. I couldn’t breathe. This concerned me. It took a second or two to realize that I had the wind knocked out of me. He was outside of the car asking me if I was alright. He looked very concerned. It took me a few very long seconds to regain my breath. I was finally able to tell him that I was OK. By this time he was on the passenger side trying to open the door and I was trying from the inside. It didn’t work. I crawled out the driver side door and got myself to my feet. Holy Shit! As I surveyed the scene I noticed that there was a telephone pole chopped off about three feet off the ground down the road and it appeared to me that there was no motor in the car any more. The car came to rest in a horse field about 50 yards from the chopped off telephone pole and there was two sections of fence broken and generally missing between the pole and where we ended up. He and I walked around checking out what happened and there was a man there who told us he had called 911. The EMTs and the police showed up and went to the car to look for bodies. They were all amazed that we walked away from that crash. We did. I basically just got all banged up. I was wearing the bruises of where the seatbelt was for three weeks afterwards. The bumps on my head went away in a few days. The only thing I can figure from this crash is that I am one of the luckiest people on the earth. Either that or I am immortal.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 10:38 and is filed under Rantings Diversified. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.