Human magnet

This is where I go back in my catalog of insanities to something that happened in high school, because work is currently boring, and I’m tired of my public library set.

Growing up, I’ve always sort of been a magnet for flying projectiles (I am pretty sure this is why I was always put in the goalie position when playing soccer at school – I had to take my glasses off, so I couldn’t see the ball, per se, but always managed to stop it anyway!  Or, maybe the kids were intentionally kicking the ball into me … I’m not going down that path. It is dark.)

Stay away from paranoia.  It’s just not good for you.  You’d be better off eating the dirt on the Path to Self-Doubt (it might even taste like Folgers).

Anyway, one day in my teens (ie after that point in childhood development where your skull fuses and hardens), a Friend and I are walking to our local Starbucks for coffee.

Things were going well – Friend and I were having a nice chat, and the weather wasn’t totally oppressively hot.  It was at this point that the Fates saw their opportunity to throw a wrench into this idyllic state.  Or, rather, a seatbelt buckle.

At first, I didn’t know that is was a seatbelt buckle (because who DOES that?!) – something really big and heavy just went careening into my head.  Really hard.  Thus Friend hearing a “cracking” noise (followed by profuse profanity with the fluid skill of a sailor).

My Friend is no stranger to freak accidents herself, and thus knew exactly what to do.

This is, after all, the same woman who broke her leg after tripping on a basketball and managed to get her foot stuck in a tree.

We ran over to the next parking lot (because it had hit me hard enough to fly that far afterward) and retrieved the offending item, which turned out to the heavy part of a seatbelt that is anchored into the seat of a car/truck.  It was around this time that I discovered that my head was bleeding.

Thankfully, Starbucks was within easy walking distance, and I managed to drag myself over there to ask for something with which I could apply pressure and try to stop the bleeding. (Head wounds are crazy.)

I spent a few minutes in the Starbucks bathroom with an ice-filled rag against my head, and then – without even getting the coffee for which we had originally set out – we decided it would be best to go back to my house where I would try not to fall asleep for fear that I might never wake up.  I probably should have gotten stitches.  The scar is still there.

I ended up taking the seatbelt buckle to school (because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager and you want to prove how tough you are), and another friend promptly lost it.

So the moral of this story is that if you manage to dislodge the seatbelt anchor in your car – DON’T CHUCK IT OUT YOUR WINDOW.  This is one one of those common sense situations where I become re-aware of just how little common sense there is in the world.   That shit hurts physically, and doesn’t do a whole lot of things positively for one’s emotional security (seeing as how even people that I DON’T KNOW were out to get me).

And so I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite historical heroes, Bertrand Russell:

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”