HARD KNOCKS

Pain sucks. I’m not talking about emotional pain – no. This is about physical pain, the explosive kind; the kind of pain that makes you involuntarily blurt out obscenities. It’s almost fun reminiscing about some of those incidents, as traumatic as they might’ve been.

There was the time I fell off my bike. I’ve fallen off it numerous times but this one time it was especially bad. Mama >d® had sent yours truly downtown to pick something up, so I hopped on my bike and went on my way. I was going too fast around a bend on my way back when all of a sudden there was this dude like 3 meters right in front of me. Being the Einstein that I can sometimes be, I hit the wrong brake, and hard. The next couple of seconds had me flying over the handlebars and head-butting dude right in the solar plexus, both of us hitting the ground, stunned. [Dude broke my fall tho, ha ha!]

My cousin’s car’s alternator got fried so she got another. Her son, then 8 or so, was mad curious about it and he kept messing with it, trying to see it better. It was lying on a mat on the coffee table and he could only see the top of it. He wanted to see the bottom side so he, in a flash of brilliance, lifted the whole thing above his head so he could see its underside, instead of merely flipping it. Suddenly, his strength failed him and he let go of the alternator which, complying with the laws of Physics, came down and smacked his dome so hard he had a cut and a bump to match on his forehead the size of a golf-ball.

Back then when I was a strapping young whippersnapper I pole-vaulted. Not professionally - merely for kicks. There was no such thing as a professionally-made pole that was made specifically for pole-vaulting so we had to fashion our own pole-vaulting poles.
[Got that?] I learned one day tho that any old pole wouldn’t do. The drier it got the more susceptible it was to snapping and that particular dry pole did just that, right when I was at the apex of my trajectory. It’s a wonder I didn’t impale myself on the splintered pole while going down and I went down hard then lay there for a spell, shook.

There was never a shortage of farm animals while growing up. I learned real quickly to steer clear off some animals, especially that perpetually pissed-off bull and that fiercely territorial boar, as they could obliterate my little ass. One day tho, I learned first hand why someone came up with the battering ram phrase. I was watching the goats & sheep when I thought I’d seen some goat sneak out through the gate. Mama >d® would’ve served my ass up on a platter if I’d lost even one animal, so I cut across the herd while doing a quick head-count. One second I was walking and the next I was lying prostrate on the grass several feet away, and then the area around my right kidney suddenly hurt like hell. I was like WTF?! I looked around and spotted this one ram looking down at me with a triumphant glint in its eye from several feet away. I started to get up and Ram started to back up, getting ready for another smack-down. Needless to say I scrambled up and made a run for the gate, all the while feeling Ram’s hot breath tickling the hairs on my shins. *shudder*

The most painful, and perhaps the closest call, was the car accident my boy V^6 and I had a couple of years ago. We were like a quarter-mile from the crib and navigating this one curve at about 50MPH when we heard something snap in the car’s suspension and, as luck would have it, the car wouldn’t turn. It’s somewhat a nightmare watching oneself make a beeline for the guardrail without being able to do anything about it. Strangely, it almost seemed like it was in slow-motion coz I clearly saw the guardrail coming towards us, heard the virtual explosion and the squeal of tortured metal, felt my body jerk against the belt and then – nothing. I woke up to V^6 shaking me by the shoulder, and then the pain hit. Apparently I had snapped the rearview mirror right off the windshield with my head and, in protest, the airbag had punched me back into the seat, probably for breaking the mirror. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Bullsh*t. I say hell hath no fury like an airbag deployed, and that’s the truth. Dude, it felt like a grown man had sucker-punched me right in the mouth!
We walked away from that one, give or take a few scrapes and nicks here and there. We were lucky, so the Emergency people said. I know we were. Shoot, the next day we were collecting pieces of the car 20 feet away!

And speaking of lucky: I saw my blue-eyed bombshell in the blue RX-7 again this morning. This time I pulled up alongside her while traffic was flowing and beeped. She looked, laughed, then floored it, disappearing around a bend. Showoff. I like that tho.