The beach is disgusting.
We were greeted by the bloated, fly infested corpse of a cat.
Further down, there was a balcony-like thing supported by these long, rotten columns of wood.
And on this balcony, was 4 chairs.
Destiny? Chance? Luck? Coincidence?
I don't care.
As long as I had a nice seat to admire the beautiful sea.
And you can already taste the sarcasm in my voice.
Especially if you've parked yourself in Lido Beach before.
I hear and ambulance pass by,and it just occurred to me that I've been in an ambulance before!
I just suddenly remembered. And it hit me that all these months I've been thinking to myself that someday I might end up in one. For Dog's sakes man, I couldn't even remember being in it till today. Come to think of it, it was all a blur.
It was right after jamming, somewhere in mid April.
I know it was drizzling, around 5-ish. The roads were wet. My brother and I were in the old Unser(!) driving back home. Listening to some Audioslave, moderate speed, no racy, or draggy feel to it. Then that bastard curve next to the ravine showed up and shot my Saturday to hell.
Just then I was thinking of dinner. How appropriate.
It wasn't the crash that scared me. Hell I was askin the people around me if THEY were ok. It was that 3 seconds before the crash. My whole life, I assured myself that when death came, I would defy it. Slip away somehow. But that was not enough. I couldn't just stop the car when it went swervy. All I could do was push my knees away from the dashboard (I valued my knees more than my hands) and scream like I was being branded with a hot iron.
The black out seemed exactly like in the games, and sometimes movies except it hurt. Open your eyes a second, see people walking around, hear some annoying noise and even more annoying voices. Then go black again. Once you go black, you don't go back. Well actually you do. Well I did anyway.
Next thing I remember, someone, I think my brother, was dragging me through the windscreen. Everything's still semi black. I blurt out about my arm being broken. They hear me. But that arm still gets a teaspoon of windscreen pieces lodged into it (still there smatter a fact). No pain really. Just in my head. It feels like a dream. Or more like, trying to remember a dream, the harder you try to know what was happening, the more it slipped away. Then for some reason, it really did started to become weird. My primary school teacher is crying. What? I can't even open my eyes long enough to tell if it's her or some wrong piece of memory that drifted into reality. But it is her. I tell her I'm OK. Then I hear my parents and sister. By this time I'm on the sidewalk, my head resting on something, and my broken arm on my torso. The sky is grey and getting darker.
We all wait by the wreckage. The Unser smiles at us. It always has that smile in it's grile. But now it's mishapen, like some disabled person smilling. But it still smiles. Then I know why it's smiling. Because I smell petrol. And petrol catches fire donit? I try to tell them, but they say it's OK. I might as well. I can't move my legs anyway. Too damn scared to move 'em. Might be broken too. Nothing burns. And we all wait there. on the sidewalk, next to a smokin' wreck.
Half - a - freaking hour later and an ambulance shows up. I pray that it's not from GH. I get an answer. It's from GH. I feel sleepy. I nearly sleep when they load me on a stretcher. Then they put on this thing on my arm to keep it aligned and the sharp pain is enough to keep me awake a minute longer. My mom was in the ambulance too, I think. This parts a little fuzzy. I think I actually do sleep off(no wonder I couldn't remember it).
A month in a cast. A nice month in fact. Everyones extra nice to me, and I get all the privalages of a handicapped person. I try to recall what happened, but my brain shuts out the bad parts. So I fill it in. It's a good story, and everyone buys it. What I told them really did happen. But it wasn't at all cool or fun. It was life changing. I realise that now, after more than a year. Being so close to death I could almost smell it. Being unable to stop everything and rewind. I suddenly realised how mortal I am. How we ALL are. I grew up thinking everything that happened, happened for me, because of me, or even had something to do with me. But I now realize, the world moves on. Just as the world has moved on since all those great people (Ghandi, JFK, etc.) have left. Just as the world has moved on since all those insignificant people left.
I'm not one to look back and be emo about a tragedy that I had to go through, and the loss it brought. I'm one to be emo about the present or near future, if at all I do get emo. But since remorse is for the dead, it would make more sense tread carefully every step of the way. Because once you do or say something, there's no going back.
The accident hurt my left side a lot.
As a result,
My left limbs suck at drumming.
I can do next to anything under the sun with my right leg and hand.
But when it gets down to the real thing, the left side brings everything down.
Meaning, I need to get those practice pads and work on the left as hard as possible.
I think I wrote half of this in past tense, and
the other in present.
I'm not one for tenses anyway.
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