For The LGF Lounge. The Car Accident

My true story as to why drinking and driving is bad
Current mood: sore

If you are special enough to be on my email list, you probably read this already. If not, here it is again.

The Accident:

I was the passenger in the car. The official police report states that they found burn marks in the tree 15ft up. The roof of the car skimmed the telephone pole above my head. I should be in a lot worse shape than I am...here's the story:

I met this dude Dave who is an electrical engineer working over at MIT. He was apparently depressed about losing his job Friday and we were both really drunk after the Bachelor party for my friend Jim. No one told me he was so depressed recently and I had never met him before.

Well, he totally lost it when we got back from Foxwood's on the party bus. We were just talking about cars stuff...comparing our audio systems, the engines, the transmissions...no driving, just sitting and talking....we were staying in Douglas for the night and no one had any intention of driving.

Then, out of nowhere, while showing me the satellite radio in his new Mazda 3, he turns the thing on and dumps the clutch. He then promptly gets the car to 60 down the road towards Rhode Island. I was caught completely off guard and my first instinct was to put my seatbelt on. I was yelling for him to slow the eff down. We took a left on to East Whallum St. and he got it up to 60 again before he finally realized I was yelling and swearing for him to fucking stop driving. He ignored everything I said up until some random driveway. He pulls in and stops then he turns to me and says, "maybe you should drive back I don't think I should." So I said I would, as my drunkenness had already been replaced with adrenaline...

Instead of letting me take over, he just turns away and says "Nope, I got it." He then backs out the driveway and tears off down the road again. The last number I saw was 70mph on the speedometer. He loses control and overcompensates on the wheel...no brakes were applied at all....he wasn't even aware of what he was doing. We hit the embankment on the opposite side of the road and this is where I realized I was going to be implanted in a telephone pole. We got up about 8-12ft in the air and if the car didn't twist towards the passenger side I would have been inside of that pole.

Basically what had happened was that we hit the embankment at a slight angle with me facing down the road. This caused the car to lift up and roll to the passenger side. The nose and roof above my head hit the telephone pole and the frame of the car took some gashed out of the tree. There was literally ~8.5ft of space between the telephone pole and the tree. We passed through and the car landed on the passenger side nose and crumpled in the front. Once the airbags went off and I realized I wasn't dead, I was able to unbuckle myself and force my door open. I then got over to the driver side to get Dave out and to shut off the car. I wanted to fucking kill him. I should never have been in the car.

The police asked if I wanted to press charges. I declined. I was just happy to be alive and able to get out of the car without any major injuries. He ended up with stitches in his eyelid, a black eye, etc. I just have a bunch of bruises and need to get to the doctor to check out my left shoulder, which hasn't stopped throbbing. Ultimately, Dave signed up for AA the next day and is getting help with his problems. He feels terrible about it all, and he should. I told him that if he gets a few sucker punches in the face from me when he doesn't expect it, consider it par for the course.

So what did I learn? Never trust a drunk person with keys to a car. Even if there is no reason to drive, it's always a possibility that they could take off. I could have died because this guy was a drunk idiot. So just be really careful when you go out. If you want to get obliterated so night, call a cab. Don't trust your friends to drive and especially don't trust yourself.

Oh yeah, and when you want to pound a bottle of Jager and drive like an asshole, be prepared to piss and/or shit yourself if you crash. Dave had definitely left himself go midair.

So here's the pictures:

4:30pm on a Wednesday

Unemployment leaves a bitter taste in your mouth when you start paying bills out of that large sum of money you had saved over the last four months because it takes 21 days for the government to start paying the unemployment insurance. In that short period of time from January to April, when I actually had a job, I opened my first ever saving account and put $6000 in it while also paying off my $4000 credit debt, and $2000 HDTV debt.

It felt awesome and all I really did to save all that loot was to stop buying people drinks while going out 5 nights a week. The only downside I've encountered since I stopped being Mr. Irresponsible is that I suddenly come home with a couple spare bills in my wallet....which sometimes leads me to explore the seedy underworld of late night Chinese food using the safe words that my girlfriend taught me to get slightly better/less greasy fare. Oops.

Anyway, that was on my mind a few minutes ago while I sat in my screen porch watching MSNBC and drinking something called a "Gin Buck". Being unemployed leaves me with a few hours a day to do random web searches. For instance, today I search "Buck drinks" (because the only one on my mind more than my girlfriend is me) on Google and found the "Gin Buck". So, "what the hell", I said out loud to the two pugs staring at me.

It's actually not a terrible drink. In fact, I'd say it's pretty good. The piny taste of the gin is extremely mellowed by the snappy ginger overtones.

The job search in three words:

Fun as hell.

I have absolutely no trouble talking to people... I have no trouble communicating to lots of different people. In my years at school, I tried to fight the sometimes too easy to accept "Robot Engineer" yoke. Lots of really great engineers are nothing more than robots under that fleshy outside. Some of the smartest sold their personalities to the engineering devil in exchange for a slightly enlarged left brain hemisphere. I did the opposite. I just sold my soul for rock and roll...or whatever.

The benefits of not succumbing to the urge to be the smartest, most wedgied engineer at school are that now, in my mid-twenties, I am given a lot of freedom to communicate cross-group and embrace projects that truly need multi-functional players.

Job interviews have become nothing more than a business presentation in which the product I'm selling and explaining is "me". It's so simple it's scary. Don't lie about who you are and what you do, and don't be afraid to tell the people exactly WHO you are and WHAT you do. I spent the last two interviews talking about the places that I could use growth and where I would like to better my professional career. Honesty, from declaring yourself the dude who farted on the T to telling a potential employer that you sometimes need to take a step back to reorganize yourself to ensure streamlined process development, is the best policy.

Ok, I've run through two Gin Bucks now and I know I'm rambling, so here's a picture of a random coil...

Born 5-26-07

Will I update regularly? We'll see. We'll see.

The world knows it wants to hear about me....