music: “It Could’ve Been A Brilliant Career,” Belle & Sebastian
What is it about catastrophe that brings people together? Honestly, if anyone has a thought, I’d love to hear it, because this amazing phenomenon of nature baffles the hell out of me.
You’re probably asking, “What catastrophe?” Well, I’ll be really macabre for a moment and take great delight in telling you that there was a car wreck right outside my house today, at approximately 2:30 p.m. No-one was hurt, probably because the accident concerned one moving car and one parked one. This lowered the probability of injury to begin with, and then the fact that I live in a residential neighborhood (with the innate speed limit of a lousy 30 mph) pretty much sealed the safe fate of the driver. He was a little shaken up, though.
I had just turned on MTV to watch the only episode of Punk’d that I haven’t yet seen, when I heard the most sickening crunch. I assumed my mom had dropped something upstairs and turned up the volume. Mom yelled down to me, and, thinking she was going to ask me what I’d done to make that noise, I ignored whatever it was she said. I heard the front door slam a few times, and then my mom shouted for me to bring the cell phone, there’d been an accident.
Excitedly, I popped up, snatched the phone, and dashed outside, barefoot, hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail. The neighbors had flowed out of their respective houses [woman with baby and woman’s dad from across the street, nurse-in-training next door, nosy little lady three doors down], and mom was calling to a rather dizzy looking guy in his early twenties or so.
The scene was very cool. The offending vehicle was a rather new coffee-colored truck, which had rammed into the considerably larger black truck that is always parked on the opposite curb from ours. The coffee-truck’s front fender had come off completely, and lodged itself into the now warped rear end of the black truck. A carpet of glass and metal trailed from the back of that truck to the completely crunched front end of the other truck, which had obviously been driven in reverse for several seconds, as one could guess from the distance. The airbag was sagging, white and limp, from the middle of the steering wheel, and a clearish fluid was gushing from under the engine at an alarming rate, sending the stream of liquid floating down the street in a kind of toxic river.
All of our neighbors, my mom and I, and Roxie after she arrived, stood around and talked for two hours. We actually ended up meeting a family we’d never met, and learned more about everyone’s jobs, wishes, hopes, dreams, histories…than I know about some of my friends. And it was all at the mercy of this horrified young man who’d taken his eyes off the road for a few seconds too long.
Silly people and their grisly reasons for introducing themselves.
On a different note, I felt oddly energetic this evening. So, at eleven p.m., I pulled on some purple shorts, my pink “Chicks Rule” tee, green santa claus socks and an old pair of sketchers, and took to the treadmill. I pounded the life out of that thing for a good fifteen minutes. I was surprised that I can still run that easily. I haven’t run in a while, I”ve only been jogging sporadically. I’ve thought for awhile now, though, that fitness won’t just disappear if you slack off for a couple weeks. It gallingly lingers there, somewhere in your body, a nagging reminder of what you should be doing, making it somewhat easier to get back into a rhythm. I like exercise. My skin always looks healthier after I run. But yes, that’s what I was doing an hour before midnight on a Wednesday. Aren’t I a fun person to hang out with?
Congrats to the lovely Abigail on Mix of the Week!!!Well done, as always.