Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, August 25, 2003 Title: It's like Six Feet Under meets American Splendor! Co-worker called in sick today, sounding terrible. I asked her if she was okay. She went on to tell me how she had almost choked to death the night before.Her throat had been bugging her so she went to sleep with a cough drop in her mouth. That's the sort of thing I've done before, but I would've said I had anyway because she sounded so upset with herself. She woke up with the drop in her throat completely blocking her breathing. She almost died and, because she lived alone, she'd had to save herself, nobody to help her, nobody to comfort her. Her throat was so torn up, she sounded like she was re-living it while she was telling me the story. Plus, her cell phone kept cutting out--giving the call an eerie dissonance to it. This is what a call from the dead would sound like. I feel bad repeating the story. I know she's embarrassed by it--she's the type of person who would circulate the Darwin Award emails at work, and rightfully considers herself to be very intelligent--but I'm kind of haunted by it. Part of it I'm sure is my own narcissism, but I'm the type of person who's always haunted by those Darwin Award stories. As I said, I've gone to sleep with a lozenge on the throat. I've done stuff with an utter lack of common sense and know I'll do so again, no matter how vigilant I try to be. There was one night in my early twenties where I sped through a stoplight-controlled single-lane tunnel as fast as I could, just because it looked like something out of a movie, the way the lights strobed across my windshield faster and faster. Before I knew it, I was out of tunnel and I slammed on the brakes, coming out in a high speed skid that surely would have killed myself and whoever was on the other side of the tunnel. Fortunately, it was 3:00 a.m. and nobody was there--although I still almost went straight off the road and off into a gully where I probably also would have died. Over fifteen years later, I still get creeped out thinking of it, and when I think that only winning the statistical crapshoot kept me from being both dead and a murderer, I feel deeply ashamed: that existential shame that comes from having to take credit for something that might've happened even though it didn't. "Let me tell you," my co-worker said in her dead woman's voice. "I'm never doing that again." "You know what?" I said. "Neither am I." posted by Jeff Lester | 3:33 PM | |
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