On Tuesday I should have died, and I don't know why I didn't

Sure glad you made it with no more damage than there was, not that wasn't bad enough.

Amazing how fast things can happen, isn't it?

dayum

Raprap - am so verra verra pleased the "grace of whatever" kept ya with us

heal well and go live some more
x

Nothin's better for learnin' than real life. Have them compute the force needed for your nose to break the rear window of a vehicle. They should be able to figure out your actual speed as you became airborne.

Stay safe, man. Good luck on your search.

Glad you're (more or less) all right. Whew.

Rap, I dunno if you're up for reading this, but if so, here's the link re Roger's meeting with a car -
http://able2know.org/topic/95384-1

I see it starts out we me being my usual bratty self.

raprap wrote:

chai2 wrote

Many years ago a friend of mine attempted suicide. Recovering in hospital she was visited by a woman she did not know, who just came and sat with her, talking about things in general. The conversation came around to her reasons for wanting to take her own life. My friend said it was because she felt useless, she had no looks, she had no talents - she felt she was just taking up space, and could find no purpose in her life.

The woman began to come up with scenarios of how, one day, my friend might save someone from drowning, or being run over by a bus, etc, and that person might be the research scientist who finds the cure for cancer or some such. With her self esteem at such a low ebb, my friend poo-poohed this idea, saying she was such a jinx she was more likely to harm than to help.

The woman then said that perhaps that was her purpose for being; perhaps she would walk into someone and knock them over and the time taken for them to get back on their feet would mean they would step off the kerb at the next corner a few seconds later than intended, just a sufficient delay to avoid stepping into the path of a speeding car. No one would notice it, no one would remember the incident, but that person might have been crucial to the future of mankind, or the world.

The woman left and my friend never saw her again. We assumed she was a volunteer visitor. But my friend started thinking about this, that we probably do fulfill our purpose in life without ever recognising it. It certainly helped her in her recovery. She looked at herself differently and got back on an even track.

Hello raprap.
I don't know you very well, I just want to share your relief & joy at surviving to live another day ...
Phew!

I do hope you have that helmet by now!

How do you rear end a parked car?

Watch were you are going.

Congratulations on surviving.

Joe(On a moving bicycle, never think about anything else)Nation

I don't think most people purpose in life is even as obvious as that. I think that we all like to think we will do something that will in some way be helpful, and that the other person will recognize that we helped them.

Personally, I don't believe that. If we all do have some accomplishment we were meant to complete, it may be very subtle.

Or, perhaps, as the saying goes, one's reason for living may be to serve as a bad example to others.

A few months after I moved to another state, I got a phone call that a good friend has died in an accident. He was on a motorcyle. He was in an intersection, paused, when the light changed. A car was also in the intersection, paused. The driver of the car said he waved Billy on, but Billy was waving him on at the same time. They both did the little dance of "You go...no, you go" a couple of times. They both decided to go, and he got ran over by the slow moving vehicle. The friend who told me said that she had seen Billy right before and said hello. Billy said he'd love to talk, but he had to go somewhere. He went off and got killed. It was awful that she could have said just a few words to him, making him stop for 10 or 15 seconds, and he wouldn't have been in that intersection when the light changed. Maybe he would have been behind another vehicle, and had to stop.

I don't know what any of that means, I just felt I had to tell it. Maybe that was my purpose.

BTW, my grandfather died before I was born. He got killed while directing traffic around a dead mule in the road.

Ain't life something?

Similar story but better ending here -
Landslide up close:
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_17750305

I know that highway very well and that section was always a bit of a heart thumper to pass through. Important too, as it is really the only good alternative to drive from coastal humboldt county to, say, San Francisco. There's one other, but it's waaaay out of the way, by several hours. They've talked about building some kind of detour route(s) past the scary parts for years..

Get Well Soon Rap! I feel your pain!

I had a similar experience quite some years ago. I was riding against a 20mph or so headwind, and was really hammering the gear I was in. I would put my head down during intervals of harder pedaling. The last interval saw me hitting an enormous rock right in the middle of my path on the shoulder of the road. I flew over the handlebars and did a face plant right on the asphalt. My two front teeth broke and shot out through my upper lip. I found them a few feet ahead of where I had landed. In the emergency room they had to call in a plastic surgeon to suture the hole that my incisors had left, and also two other gashes, one right under my lower lip, and the other right under my chin.

Afterwards I wasn't reflecting about still being miraculously alive as much as I was thinking, "what a frigging idiot for not looking where I was going."

A few years later I had another accident involving a moving car—driver’s fault--and I’m probably lucky that that one didn’t kill me. Thinking about that one, I vacillated between “someone’s looking out for me,” and “it’s dumb luck that I’m still alive.” I’m more convinced that the latter is the case.

I just love it when someone tells you how lucky you are that you are right handed. Like, who needs a left arm, anyway.

<snort>

I'm, at least technically, left handed.
I write with my left, but do everything else with my right.

While in college, I was working at the customer service desk at Sears. I was filling out paperwork for a woman & her husband, and she said to me "I feel so sorry for you (I look up), it must be so hard for you to write with your left hand.

Her husband gave her the look I wish I could have.

He said something like "jesus christ harriet, she's left handed!"

I understand what that woman meant. Southpaws are vile and wicked people who should be either imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives and/or be exterminated.

Did I mentioned that they should also be sterilized?

Well then, I've got all bases covered.

I've seen pictures of your "prison" yard. Pretty nice digs. Southpaws don't deserve bird baths and nice paving stones in their yards. Shall we consider 'extermination'?

I'm a prisoner of love.