Someone asked this question today: "I sometimes wish that some type or [sic] horrible accident or something would happen to me, just so I wouldn't have to worry about work or money for a little while. What kind of scary realizations do you come up with about yourself?"

Do you read Reddit.com? It's kinda like social networking for folks who aren't social. Like Digg.com or 4chan but more mature and serious. So, today, a Redditor named Zygg posted the above statement and question.

Here's the link to the page. I answered the post. As it turns out, this website has a ten thousand character limit to the length of the replies to postings. So here's what I wrote in reply:

"Mmm, I kinda know how you feel but...

I was a bicycle courier in Houston in the late 90's. Was working for the top company downtown when this happened, making great money, insurance, even the kind that would pay for a box, grave, and nice tombstone if I'da gotten greased by a truck or cabbie.

I've written you a story that took me two hours to write. I had just gotten home from work and put the wife to bed, hopped on Reddit, and run into your post just a page or two in. The whole time, I should've been eating, mebbe watching some Netflix, and getting ready to pull an opening shift at the restaurant tomorrow morning as part of a double. I should be half a bottle or more into my wine by now but just got up to open one thirty minutes ago. Have I taken my meds? Fuck, I'm not sure... Zygg, you've captured my night's attention.

I exceeded the ten thousand character limit imposed by Reddit on replies to posts and made myself cry, too.

So I reposted all of this on my blog. And then went in and kissed my sleeping wife and pet the cat (thumbnail scratches up and over the head, from between the eyes, like their mothers lick their kittens in loving grooming) and told him "Good boy, keep Mama warm"- it's finally gotten cold down here.

That damn character limit makes me think that this story won't get as many readers as I'd like but that could just be, well, less relevant, all the other folks versus you, Zygg. Head on over to my blog for the whole thing: __ "

Here's my answer that didn't fit:

"Mmm, I kinda know how you feel but...

I was a bicycle courier in Houston in the late 90's. Was working for the top company downtown when this happened, making great money, insurance, even the kind that would pay for a box, grave, and nice tombstone if I'da gotten greased by a truck or cabbie.

[Yeah, you've read that part...]

Some Houston buses are double long, articulated in the middle. One particular bus-stop is just twenty feet from a parking lane that runs the rest of the block. And the parking lane starts back up on the next block. So the buses have to pull to the right after passing the parked cars to get to get to the curb and reach the bus stop. And then S-curve back into traffic when taking off for the next stop.

One fine afternoon, a Friday, about four pm (so my bag was full of the kind of runs that have to be there in minutes and so pay the best, my favorite time of day cuz I've had all day to warm up and can now just drop the hammer and do the quicksilver dance). Full traffic, five lanes of it coming from the left, six from behind, waiting next to the crosswalk for the light to change, when one of these buses, in the middle of leaving the bus stop and S-curving back out into traffic, hits me from behind, me, not the bike. Threw me over the handlebars (road bike drop handlebars, my thumbs were twisted wrong and backwards against the brake hoods by the impact) and into the crosswalk, human cannonball, people scattered around me like bowling pins. My Motorola radio was in my bag, the kind cops use. The bus hit the radio, on the left side of the back of my pelvis, and there are three parallel cuts from where the bag was hole-punched between the bus and grill on the radio.

So, people pick themselves up, some pissy and glaring ("fuckin' courier!"), some frightened,  some scraped up. The light changes, five lanes of rush-hour start coming from my left, adrenaline kicks in and I could have drug myself to the curb by my fingernails if I'da had to. We all clear the crosswalk and I'm leaning on my bike, feeling like I'm about to explode in ten different ways...

The bus pulls over, disgorges its passengers, and the bus driver steps off the bus, saying in his stage voice "who hit my bus?". As if, motherfucker...

Metro drivers carry a stack of postcards addressed to Metro with blanks to fill in by witnesses in case of an accident or collision. This motherfucker packed everyone off the bus and sent them on to other buses instead of handing any of these postcards out. I got his name, badge number, bus number, a police report, and a bunch of names and numbers from nearby pedestrians volunteering to be witnesses. Was in agony by the time the cops showed up, adrenalin wearing off, muscles, nerves, ligaments, and tendons having all been impact-stretched in the wrong direction and now reacting. I didn't have anything broken, didn't have anything obvious wrong with me, so I got one of my company drivers with a pickup truck to cart me and by bike home. Spent most of the weekend in a hot bath soaking but by the end was twisted up like I'd spent a lifetime bent under the yoke of heavy labor, as my muscles and tendons contracted to protect the damaged tissue.

I went in late Monday afternoon but couldn't work for but an hour or so. Got a ride home again, got a lawyer, started a couple different kinds of therapy and was laid up in bed for seven months when I wasn't at the doctor's or therapist's office.

One bright light- after a month or so of being out of work, I went downtown to see my boss to beg for some money- I was working for him when I was hit, after all. He asked how much I wanted. "Oh, rent, utilities, some food and few beers, seven hundred?" I didn't know at the time how long I was going to be laid up. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and then opened his drawer, explaining that he'd written two checks. The low one was for if I had high-balled him, $1000. Since I low-balled my request, he gave me the bigger one, for $1500. I didn't have a way, then, to really be able to put a value to that but it was a nice day in a string on shitty ones.

That was early on, like I said, before I knew how long this was going to last. I lived on the third floor of my building. There was a locked gate downstairs, a locked door at ground level, and my locked door on the second floor. It took me six months to hear that Alan Ginsberg, not laid up but in a similar situation vis a vis New York City walk-up locked doors downstairs, would put his door key in a sock and toss it out the window to his visitors, so they could let themselves in and come on up. So receiving visitors, just letting them in, was agony most days. I had soft tissue damage, hard to litigate against because it doesn't show up on an X-Ray. Sciatica, a stretched portion of one of the main nerves that ran down my back and into my legs. Nerves aren't supposed to stretch, they're pretty in-elastic. And they take forever to mend. When I moved wrong and set it off, it was like plugging into an electrical circuit, with my body, my back and legs and shoulders, neck, head and feet, even down to my fingertips sometimes. And it went off seemingly randomly-  I couldn't just avoid predictable trigger movements to in such a way as to prevent it.

Seven months of lost wages, seven months nearly stir crazy. Another year after that only able to earn by answering phones at a pizza joint because sitting very fucking still in a chair was all my back could handle. An office job would have rocked but the U. of H. lost seventeen of my library books, somewhere between the parking lot drop box and the library proper. That cost me my transcripts (pay, don't fight, young Grasshopper!)

Random electric-chair attacks of Sciatica for over two years. Seven months just down the drain against the same with no pay,  and two years pretty much in limbo. One more huge adrenalin drain from a finite supply already taxed by being hit by four cars before the bus.

Heh, four cars and a bus, doing something I loved and getting paid pretty much straight across for what I put into it. And I'm still alive to talk about it. That's perspective...

So, Metro has excellent lawyers, my lawyer had never taken them on or handled a similar case, and there was a dispute as to whether or not I was inside or outside the crosswalk (bikes aren't supposed to be). As if it matters-Metro hit me! Well, one would think, right? They just fought and stalled. And when Metro ran out the clock on the two year statute of limitations my state has in this kind of case, add goose eggs, nada, zilch for compensation to all the lost time and money and pain, continuing pain.

Another small light in the darkness during this time- I was riding the damn Metro to an appointment one day when the bus driver edged over into the outside lane, where a bicyclist was riding next to the curb. The poor bastard was literally shouldered off the road by the bus, tipping over the curb with his wheels at the fulcrum point. I saw the whole thing and got a handful of witnesses from other bus passengers. And then, all laid up and out of work, had months where I could afford to do nothing but call Metro offices, bosses, supervisors, directors, board members, city officials, etc. Got that rotten fucking bus driver fired AND got to call him up and gloat afterwards every day for a few months.

I saw few visitors. No TV, no VCR, had a "kill your TV" bumpersticker. Read all my books and magazines. I had an old computer but no internet connection. Became an expert at Scorched Earth, the granddaddy precursor to Angry Birds and other ballistic games. Yeah, so I can still wipe your face with your ass today in this game, calculating power and angle like I've got Asberger's, (it's still a challenge my brother is up for when we get to see each other, one of those sibling rivalries he feels like he should be able to win, now that he's my bigger little brother). Yeah, I eventually cataloged menageries of animals and faces in the stippled patterns in the ceiling of my apartment (not just above the bed, you don't just lay in bed during time like this, sometimes your body just says "LAY DOWN RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW, MOTHERFUCKER". And you do), yeah I wrote a few good poems, got a little revenge on a bus driver.

And lost a lot of brain cells, not from the weed folks would occasionally donate but from the solitude, the wracking, raging boredom. My list of friends dried up like the Aral Sea; sometimes it felt like only a camel, a Bedouin  an Apache was the only one who could sniff out the deeply hidden succor or solace to be had, the few and far-between oases in the desert. It was over a year before I could get back on the bike,  with someone who's to this day one of my best friends. It was long-awaited glory, that first ride, the wind in my ears again finally, gingerly relearning how to ride with distant hope of relearning flow and carve and swoop someday.

She's come to town this weekend, that friend, interesting timing, this question of yours. She came and sat in my section at work. We regaled her lover and their guests with tales from the old days and our eyes got all moist and doe-y when we looked at each other and said how much we missed each other. I'm weeping now.

Shit happens. Heh, I say "caca pasa" to my latino friends. "Asi es", this is how it is.

I've figured that, while it would be hell, I could learn to live with losing my eyes or my ears, taste... I've always been afraid of losing my hands, they're part of how I define my human and my animal self. As a cyclist, I've always had the black fear of losing my legs. Things. Part of the experience.

Time, our time, time for each of us, is finite on this mortal coil. Time on this shitty fucking planet, look at how deeply and profoundly we've shit this nest, how we've fucked our fellows, neighbors, our environment, our future. And most of the time, for lack of vision or understanding as much as for greed and comfort. Time so easily devalued- how do you explain our race, our history and present on this planet, to someone from another, confronted with the horrors we so easily come up with, like exhaling, like walking another step? I joke about being a recovering misanthrope. It makes it easier when I tell humans that I hate most of them. But some people are the world, some people are my life, the reward for carrying on when some days I happily, if through inaction, could just dissolve and flow back into the mud from whence we're formed and shuffle on off to the next stop on this path.

Go call your best friend. Go see your sibling. Go make peace with somebody, take them something they love with a story that makes them prize it like Jesus, Han Solo, and Joan of Ark brought it to them. Get started planning that road trip to all the museums and concerts and parks you've always fantasized about. Find someone who will sell you the kind of mind-blowing weed that the dealers usually just keep and share amongst themselves. Eat something in a really expensive restaurant with kind of top-shelf truffle oil that only the nicest joints can afford. Spend three hundred bucks on a bottle of wine and then drink it with someone special (or Johnny Walker Blue, if you're a scotch kinda guy).

Go."