SPINNING, ROLLING , BLOGGING

SPINNING, ROLLING , BLOGGING

We who blog seem to share many experiences. Of course, that's just part of the shared and common experience, the web-connected concept, what the whole blog thing is, in microcosmic form.

Like kinds find themselves.

Who woulda thought that so many of us were survivors of near-death car wrecks!?

Scoble [1] (who recently gave me some great help and encouragement on the Manilla Newbies [2] list [3]), aka via his blog, The Scobleizer [4], recounts his recent rather frightening spinning and rolling car event, from which he miraculously walked away mostly unscathed.

Doc [5] had a similar experience, as did TDCRC [6] maven and entertaining e-mailmeister Eric Norlin. In today's blog [7] Eric asks if any other bloggers have been rolling and spinning in their cars. So I sent him an e-mail, and copied Doc, who'd linked to Eric's query in his blog.

Eric sends a brief note back (brief, as in one word: "amen"), as does Doc, who suggests I post it here. So here it is, proof that we bloggers can not only withstand horrendous auto accidents, we come back and blog about it!

MY WRECK

Thanksgiving Day, 1979. I am crossing a green light at the intersection of Flatlands Avenue and 105th Street in Canarsie, Brooklyn, NY. Just as I enter the grid I take note of a big huge yacht of a Buick on the Avenue, inching toward the intersection, eager for the light to change.

I was driving a leased Mercury Cougar, provided by a client, a vehicle made with a skin not unlike the foil wrapper around a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. I proceed through the intersection at about 30 MPH.

The Buick is clearly getting edgy. Inching, inching, a little too far into the street at this point. Just as we get parallel to it, the driver floors it, anticipating a change of his light from red to green. He T-Bones the Cougar, which rolls over a number of times, then spins around, and ultimately ends up clear across the intersection, facing the wrong direction, amazingly right side up.

Windshield smashed, much of it embedded in my forehead. Car crumpled. Mother of those-days-girlfriend on the passenger side, passed out for a few moments. A good Samaritan comes over, calls an ambulance, and attends to my profusely bleeding head.

The driver of the Buick, a seventy-something doctor, holocaust survivor, and all around bad driver, is unhurt. His yacht, er, car, has some minor crumple by the radiator. The V-8 engine is unharmed.

I ended up with a "brain bruise" (more than a concussion, less than a coma, a doctor explains to me after the fact) and lost all feeling on one side and also lost the ability to speak for a few days. Major neurological short-term damage. Neck, shoulders and back all screwed up. Fifty-plus stitches on my forehead, and a scar that fades a little more each year.

Girlfriend's mother, in the front passenger seat --right where the Buick hit us-- suffers extensive neck injuries.

Seat belts saved us both from what would have been fatal, according to the EMT and the NYPD officers at the scene.

After about a year of recovery life resumed something akin to the way things used to be. Threw out the live-in girlfriend (priorities all wrong: she went shopping at a Day-After-Thanksgiving sale while I was in the hospital unable to speak, or to feel anything on my right side), so in some ways life actually got better!

Spoke with the leasing company a few months after the wreck, to take care of insurance issues and tie up loose ends. The guy from the leasing place refuses to believe it is me on the phone. "I saw that car when it came back here after the accident," the fellow says to me, "no-one walked away from that crash and lived."
As fate would have it, I proved him wrong.

Now, a few weeks short of 22 years later, I read the Scoble account [8] of events and momentarily re-live my own, glad to learn that he, too, will be alright.

Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "let's take the car out for a spin."