Have you ever been walking along the road, minding your own business, and then you get hit by a truck?
Man I hate it when that happens. It’s bad enough when the thing is moving fast, like sixty miles an hour or more. I mean, one second you’re strollin’ along, wondering if there’s a convenience store anywhere up ahead, trying to decide if you’d rather have an RC or an Orange Crush, and the next second – wham! – and you’re like, “Oh, shit!”
Probably you’re more like “!!!” because at that moment when the grille of that big rig smacks you in the back at sixty miles an hour, fifty thousand pounds of hot iron, your brain doesn’t even have time to form the simplest epithet, because it happens in a microsecond, or some real short period of time, hardly worth mentioning. However long (I mean short) it is, that’s how long it takes for most of your bones to be shattered and your spinal column severed, and now you’re flying through the air like a loose-packed sack of buckwheat, only with blood and squishy things leaking out.
So you fly for maybe 200 feet and then you hit the ground, but you’re still moving pretty fast, and with all your bones broken you can’t really stop yourself from flipping and flopping like a rag doll along the gravel for another fifty or so feet, decorating the roadside with red designs of your own blood, and the last thought you have is “Jeez, this is going to take a lot of rehab.”
And that’s if it hits you fast.
If it hits you slow, like thirty miles an hour, then half the time you get hooked on something, and instead of flying, you get dragged along. Usually there’s not as much bone-breaking, so you struggle a little to get free, but all that happens is you manage to get yourself under the truck with your torn pants caught in the front axle and the rest of your clothes ripping and burning off as you scrape along at thirty miles an hour, asphalt against skin, and believe me, the skin is not winning this one.
If you’re like me, when something like this happens you say to yourself, “I am definitely going to be more careful the next time I am walking out here on the road. I am going to walk on the left side so I can see the traffic coming, I am going to stay way the hell off to the side and I am going to wear reflective clothing at night, because that is the last time I am going to get hit by a truck.”
Amen, brothers and sisters.
Whatever hit you, it sounds like it hurt a lot.
yeah, ouch. I hope a good Samaritan finds you.
I’m OK. Nothing hit me other than the usual buckets of shit that hit me every day.
A long time ago, before my brain atrophied, I used to wonder what such an accident would feel like. I tried to put myself there by vividly imagining it, to the point where sometimes I would scare myself. Much later, I read in a psychology book that the brain can’t tell the difference between a real event and one vividly imagined. So apparently I have been hit by a truck.
Also, apparently, I have made out on the beach with Gwyneth Paltrow.
The anwer to your question is…no. Maybe it’s time to quit the cilantro.
…or how about when the truck hits you real slow… so slow it just knocks you down, rolls one of its big wheels on top of your body and then stops. Man, I hate it when that happens.
One of those days, huh?
I give up trying to subscribe to this feed on Bloglines – I need to check directly more often (because you’ve been POSTING recently! love it!) and mmmmm cilantro.
Steph – I can quit any time.
Dick – Oh, man, that is the worst.
Jayne – Just an experiment in visualization and the imagined made real.