A matter of death and near-death

The way I look at it, everyone will almost die at least once.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. If it has happened already, it may happen again. If it’s happened to you two or more times, and you’re still reading this Web log and are presumably, well, alive, then my best advice is not to ever watch the Final Destination movie trilogy. No one wants to learn that their fate is sealed from Devon Sawa.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve already almost died once. It was April Fool’s Day 2005, and I was driving on the Palisades Interstate Parkway on my way to work. Rumbling around a bend at 60-mph, I couldn’t see that some nature-loving dickface 200 yards in front of me had come to a complete stop in the passing lane of the highway to allow a grouping of Canadian geese cross the roadway. I shit you not. I slammed on my brakes, stopping just in time. The guy behind me didn’t – plowing into me from behind. My Honda Accord was completely totaled, the trunk now residing in my backseat. Somehow, I came out of the accident completely unscathed. Nevertheless, it sucked and I definitely, almost died.

I’m not alone with this car thing. My bet is that the majority of people’s near death experiences come via the roadway. Cars are scary machines, if you think about it. But there are other ways that I, and presumably you, could have and still may die, or almost die. I was watching Unsolved Mysteries on Lifetime the other day, and some college frat boy from the 80s got drunk with his friends one night in Pennsylvania and was found dead in a campus stairwell five days later.

Which got me thinking … I’ve been drunk enough to be killed DOZENS of times. So have you. When people drink, they are stupid. In fact, now that I think about it, I was almost hit by a train on the Jersey Shore a few summers back, almost got run over by a cab and a T train in Boston during college, walked, er stumbled, through the nastiest ghetto area of Atlantic City at like 3 a.m. by myself, accidentally threatened to beat up a cop (which would gotten me thrown into prison where I’d, in turn, be killed), gone swimming in the ocean/pool/lake at night, almost been in dozens of fights that could have led to a inoperable vertebre injury, the list goes on and on and on.

Did I mention I almost run over by a Zamboni machine while covering a high school hockey game? Well yeah, that happened, too.

And since I'm a lot like you, that means you've probably had your definitive near-miss (eg, your Honda incident) and your series of less death-defying brushes (eg, your Jersey Shore incidents). My working theory as of tonight is that there's a set number of Jersey Shore incident that you can accumulate, and once you hit that number, it creates a pentultimate Honda incident. I'm guessing the number is 38. I may be insane.

In summation, you will almost die at least once in your life. And you actually die once in your life. But you can also almost die more than once without definitely dying, although the two aren’t mutually exclusive. And the number 38 is somehow involved.

Now I’m just confusing myself. Everyone just try to be careful. That includes you, Devon Sawa.