The Rest of Your Life

Hello, audience. For those of you who don't know, I got hit by a car last week. I was jaywalking and not paying attention and I stepped right in front of a car. After the trip to the hospital and all the scans and x-rays and such, it turns out the only real damage was the gash in my head. They closed it up with stitches and ten staples, and I got the staples pulled out yesterday morning. Doctor says it healed up nicely, but now I get to have a scar on the side of my head for the rest of my life.

That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.

I've thought about it a couple times, the potential to have avoided what happened last week. I thought about stopping to head back to the house and grab something ten or fifteen minutes into my walk before I decided it was too late and I should just keep going. I thought about how I could have scheduled the meeting I was on my way to on a different day instead. I thought about ho I could have just been a little more patient and just waited at the crosswalk. But none of that happened.

Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.

One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.

It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.

My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.

I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.

Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.

There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.

"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."

This is my most favorite image ever. It's a picture of earth taken by the Voyager space craft as it left our solar system. For those of you who haven't seen this before, Earth is the pale blue dot in the middle of the yellowish beam of light on the right side of the picture. Here's a famous quote by Carl Sagan about it:

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

It's crazy to think about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the entire rest of the universe we exist in. To think about the vast emptiness of space, the thousands of billions of planets and moons and asteroids floating endlessly around stars, titanic collections of plasma and gases that burn and rage with such unmatched fury and intensity and beauty that our minds can hardly conceive of their devastating power. I have a love of stars because they're so impossibly powerful and uncontrollable and immense.

My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.

Knocked Out of My Shoes/Six Degrees

Hello there audience. It's nice to see you again. This is going to be a bit of a special blog, as it has two purposes. Let me hop right in.

As you may or may not have already known, I was hit by a car on Thursday. I was jaywalking during rush hour, made it across three of four lanes okay, and then didn't look both ways before I stepped into the turning lane. Next thing I remember is flying through the air upside down and hitting the ground. I looked ahead of me and saw another car coming down the lane, so I crawled onto the median. Next came a lot of screaming and cussing. Partially because I was in pain, and partially because I was mad at myself for being such an idiot. The girl who hit me stopped and came to try and talk to me, as well as a military guy who gave me something to press against my head wound. The girl asked if I was okay, and I gave her the typical "Do I LOOK okay?". An EMT guy showed up and held my neck straight in case I had any sort of neck injury, and people kept talking to me and asking questions to try and keep me focused and aware.

At some point, I noticed the girl was crying, and I said "What are you crying for? I'm the one who just got hit by a car." She replied saying she was super freaked out, and I felt a little bad for being insensitive, but I excused myself given my current position. Eventually firemen arrived and did the whole check through of my wounds and such, then I got strapped to a backboard and loaded into an ambulance. At this point, I was pretty sure my left leg was broken and maybe my lower back. I had totally forgotten about my head wound because it honestly didn't hurt that badly compared to everything else,

The EMT in the ambulance informed me that I had smashed my head into the windshield of the car and shattered it, then flipped over the car and back into the street. Which sounds pretty awesome, minus the whole dangerous accident thing. They performed all their medical stuffs on the ride to the hospital. Then I was carted into the hospital and there were a lot of people around all at the same time making comments and giving orders and such. Oh, I think they had cut off my pants and shirt by now, too. Kind of a bummer because they were some decent jeans, but they weren't my best pair, so I wasn't devastated. I was given a tetanus shot and then morphine, which felt incredibly weird.

Over the next hour I had x-rays taken of my head and neck, my chest, and my leg, and then a CT scan of my head to make sure my brain didn't get jellified or something. I spent the five minutes of sitting still listening to "In The Presence Of Enemies Part 1" by Dream Theater in my head. (Super useful skill to have, by the way, listening to music in your head). After that was more questioning from doctors and then a CT scan of my abdomen. I had to keep holding my breath so the scans would come out clear, and they injected me with a dye that made my veins feel all warm and my mouth taste gross.

This is a picture of my head after it was numbed, but before they sewed it up.

After that was cleaning out and bandaging my road rash wounds on my hand and my foot, which hurt more than I can get across in typed letters, and then sewing up my head wound. They numbed the whole wound by injecting it with needles, then sutured the under layer of skin and stapled the top layer shut. They got me some papery shirt and pants and these super awesome sock thingers that I'm definitely still wearing. I got pain medicine prescribed, and then they rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair.

Total damages consisted of my head wound, the road rash on my hand, foot, and some minor scratches on my knees, and the bruise to my left leg. That's right. No broken bones, no internal damage, just some flesh wounds.

As of two days later, I'm already walking, though my leg is stiff and inflexible for the most part. My hand is healing, now cleaned again, smothered in disinfectant goo, and re-bandaged. My head is fine, though it's a bit weird feeling the staples in my scalp. I'm still feeling dumb, though I'm thankful that I'm not more hurt than I am now. It's weird to think that I was hit by a car, knocked clean out of my shoes, smashed my head into their windshield, flipped through the air and onto the pavement, and I got away with only two serious injuries and some scratches.

Now, for the second part of this blog. I feel really terrible for the girl who hit me. She had to have been scared out of her mind by what happened, and I'm not sure if anyone got ahold of her to tell her I'm okay. I'd also like to apologize for being insensitive and for, you know, walking out in front of her car during rush hour. XP Unfortunately, I didn't think to get her cell number while I was cussing angrily and bleeding on the median, so I have no way of contacting her myself. So, I want to try something out.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Six Degrees of Separation thinger, but I'll explain it briefly. The idea originated from a Hungarian playwright who theorized that a person could be connected to any other person on the planet by as few as six introductions. This is where I need your help.

I want to use the Six Degrees of Separation to try and track down the girl that hit me so I can let her know personally that I'm okay. What I need from you all is to repost this blog on your facebook wall or whatever so it can progress another degree toward finding her. I know, this sounds like your typical chain letter or whatever, but it's different because it's actually for a cause. Nothing bad is going to happen if you don't help. I'll just be disappointed in all of you and have to try and track her down some other way. But, if you help me and we succeed, it'll be a crazy story to tell and I'll have another topic to post a blog about.

So think about it. If you live in the Colorado Springs area and you know of a youngish girl, probably late teens, that just had the windshield of her champagne-colored Camry, (I think) smashed in an auto-versus-pedestrian type accident, please let me know. cm.ludeman@gmail.com. If not, pass the link to this blog on to anyone else you know who lives in the area. It'd be awesome if you guys could help me track her down.

Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you updated as to how things turn out.