Mind Your Own God Damn Business

(I would write something interesting, but I am getting corn-holed by school right now. I said I’d try to get this Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing going though, and it’s totally Wednesday, so I guess I have to. It’s cool. I need a break from homework.)

I don’t wear a bike helmet. I think they look goofy, I mostly use my bike for commuting, I hate carrying it around, I have a gigantic head so whenever I wear a helmet it just looks like I’m wearing a plastic, strap-on yarmulke, and I’m a stupid fuck who still thinks he’s immortal like a 16 year old. It’s a bad idea, but I go without.

Exactly. Exactly.

Anyway, I was riding my bike to the gym a few days ago. I was about to cross the street into the parking lot when I heard a skidding noise.

I looked over to my right and saw a gold car come blasting around the corner up the street towards the parking lot. It went in a straight line and kept accelerating, like somebody had just tossed a brick on the gas pedal and then let the car do its thing. It jumped up onto the grass between the parking lot and the street, hopped into the parking lot and then T-boned the hell out of an SUV that was waiting to come out. I would guess that it was going about 45 miles an hour when it hit.

The SUV had a teenage girl in it, who got out, said something like “What the fuck just happened?!” and then sat down. The gold car had a girl in the passenger seat and an old woman behind the wheel. The girl in the gold car helped the old woman out and got her to a chair to sit in.

I had a very strong initial reaction when I saw the driver, which was “I should go over and punch that stupid bitch in the face.” I managed to calm myself down and go over and see if anyone needed help instead. Everyone was okay, so I hung around long enough to tell the Police what I saw and went to the gym.

What happened after that was a little bit frustrating.

Every time something like this happens to someone, and they have some sort of brush with a random negative event, they say something cliche about how “life is fleeting, and you never know when you’re going to go, blah blah blah.” Every time I hear someone say something like this, I am unsurprised and unmoved, because I’ve heard it so many times.

And then, after a car accident that didn’t badly injure anyone and that I wasn’t involved in and didn’t really even come that close to being hit, I had that exact same “epiphany”.

I always hate these moments in my life – the times when I feel like I’ve really cracked one of the mysteries of the human experience, only to realize a split second later that whatever my groundbreaking realization was is so completely, utterly common that I’ve heard it a hundred times in teen books and pop songs (Who can forget the time that I was convinced that I was the only one to realize that the humpty dance was your chance to do the hump?).

That didn’t stop me from spending a few minutes freaking out, however.

“OH MY GOD!” I thought to myself.

“If I’d ignored the screeching sound of tires and just crossed the street, or left my house two seconds sooner, or had been on a skate board instead of a bike and I’d been trying to hold on to the back of that gold car like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, I’d be crumpled up in a little heap right now! I can’t control everything in life!”

Exhibit A. You're just hanging out with some friends, watching TV, and then Cookie Monster shoots you in the face.

“You can do everything safely and mind your own god damn business (HA!), but if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, some random event can just hose you in a split second!”

It shouldn’t have been that alarming to me, but it really was; a shady patch of grass that’s five or six feet away from the road is not the kind of place where I’m watching to be sure that there’s no danger of getting hit by a car, but under the right circumstances, it’s clearly not impossible for something like that to happen. What other places that I had previously considered safe were actually just accidents waiting to happen?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer was “everywhere”. Someone with a gun could show up and shoot up my school while I was in class. Any building I’m in could randomly collapse. Even my beloved reading area – the can – could get hit by a meteor while I was enjoying myself!

I thought about all of this while working out (ironically, I never stopped to consider the fact that my knee could decide to buckle while I was squatting, or one of the supports holding the bar in place in between sets could give out – it might be dangerous everywhere else, but I was clearly safe with a bunch of weight sitting on my back), and was briefly paralyzed by it – no matter where I went or how careful I was, there would always be over a 0% chance that something might kill me.

Exhibit B. You're in an ancient temple, minding your own business, when an alien that hunts men for sport appears and kills you.

Then, I started to calm down. Not only was I freaking myself out and thinking that it was the end of the world because I witnessed a fairly minor car accident, I realized that it was pointless to worry. If I’m going to get hit by some lady in a car, or struck by lightening, or eviscerated by chupacabras, or killed by the Predator, because he’s invisible and hunts humans for sport, it’s going to happen. I can constantly worry about it, or I can just keep doing my thing and enjoy it until some act of God annihilates me.

I finished my workout, hopped back on my bike and rode home.

And then immediately ordered a bike helmet.

I’m wearing it right now.