Near Disasters

Uff, exhausting.

Yes! It definitely was.

Irina, you need to screw your bookshelves to the wall. I seriously don't know why your parents never did that, especially after them falling on you once, twice... wtf?

Imke reminded me of when Trevor almost choked to death on a hard candy when he was eighteen months.

We lived in this little town of four hundred people in the middle of nowhere (trying to run and hide and escape, ended up leaving there for here- getting lost in the city was better hiding) the nearest hospital any emergency medics or anything could come from was over twentfive miles away, the fire department was volunteer only and probably all at work, and there was one sheriff and one deputy for our entire half of the county. I wasn't getting any help even if I had thought to call for it. I was home all alone.

He started turning purple, then grey, just like Imke said she did, at first I was banging on his back, when he started changing to grey I had him upside down practically beating him and shaking him. Finally, when he was stopping with the coking and beginning to not respond, I flipped him over and somehow managed to give him the Heimlich even though I had never been taught it, and the candy popped out across the room and he started breathing and crying.

I was shaking for the rest of the day.

I'm serious. Fucking serious.

All you have to do is google 'Child crushed by furniture' for more reasons.

Here is one families story.

http://www.meghanshope.org/index.htm

All of you parents, at least, attach your furniture to the wall, dammit.

I think screwing them is a bit difficult, these are the ones I pulled down on me when I was little. What you see in the picture stands on three drawers. The other two bookcases rest on cupboards like the one on top of this.

You would use L brackets, like those that are used for hanging shelves.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2157569_anchor-bookshelf-wall.html

How do you fix that big momma of a bookcase with L brackets? Shelves, yes, but that? Or maybe you mean up on the top? We had a wardrobe fixed like that in the old apartment.

Just drive screws through the back into the wall studs with a drill. Simple.

Once when he was about 2 (I was 5) my youngest brother somehow got a hold of the kitchen scissors while my mother was ironing and decided it would be a good idea to cut the cord of the iron. There were some sparks, and it burned a hole the size of the electrical cord in the blades of the scissors, but my brother was somehow unharmed. My Mum was hysterical though. We were living temporarily in a flat above the Optometrist where my Dad worked, and I just remember my Mum giving me the scissors to go downstairs and show my father what had happened.

(I might have already told this one).

When I was 2 or 3, we were in the park with my family. My sister tells me that there was a man standing next to a red truck that was calling me over. I, being the idiot that comes with that age, was waddling over to him with a stupid smile on my face when my sister and my cousin ran after me and grabbed me before I was able to reach him. As they carried me back, they were calling the adults, so the man ran back into his truck and sped off.

Fuck. Dude.

Do any of you know what a hippy barter fair is?

They tend to be three day to a week events, picture Rainbow Gatherings on a smaller scale (if you know about those). Basically camping out with hundreds of hippies, communal living, bonfires, everyone on LSD and weed, half naked people every where- loin cloths and topless young ladies with painted breasts and all of that, everyone taking it in stride as normal attire- people with booths and tents set up selling homemade candles and jewelry and food stuffs and clothing and every crafty thing you can think of and then more than you may imagine on top, made from quality material you won't find in any normal store. Theatre and art and puppet shows and fire jugglers, all home grown and quality upon quality. Free meals and everyone welcome everywhere with love and smiles. Not really describable by the best writer (not that I am), you just have to know because you have been there or not.

I grew up at these events. We would, us kids, run around all day and night in packs through the fair and the woods an meadows around them, days, around the bonfires crowded with tripping dancing people and drum circles, nights.

one of them,these fairs, when I was eleven, a huge group of kids, myself included, were playing hide and seek on about the third day.

I hid under this van just at the edge of the whole fair, right before the tents and parked vans and cars began for acres. best spot ever. While under this van this fat greasy guy wearing a shirt that says 'Security' (yes, there were designated security people at these events, always. They are self governed events. Medics and Security and Psychological bad Trip Counselors and Clean up Crews and all of it. All labeled and identifiable in some way. Police never brought in unless for life threatening situations, which are rare.) This "security" guy, he grabs my arm and says to me "Look at you. you Bad little girl. What are you doing?" he grabs me and pulls me out from under the van. He keeps calling me a "Bad Bad Girl." saying he is taking me to "where the bad girls go". His grip on my arm is so tight I cannot squirm away at all. Though I am fighting as he drags me along. We go maybe three hundred yards like this and just by the exit that leads out into the eternal graveyard of vehicles when I see my mom talking to some person and start hollering for her.

I get her attention and she rushes over. i tell her he keeps calling me a Bad Girl that has to go to the Bad Girl Place. he is self righteous at first but then my mom, being who she is, makes one hell of a scene calling anyone around over. Before you can blink we are surrounded by dozens of people, all demanding to know the situation. the man lets go of me and I run off. He is still surrounded.

From what I hear, he was not any sort of security at all, was forced out of the camp, hurt quite well, and never heard from or seen again.

I shudder to think what he would have done to me.

I'm glad they put a really good ass whoopin on him, and glad you made it out of that.

Yes. me too.

The things I learned:

As an adult one should never be afraid or hesitant to ask what is going on if they see a child that appears to be in distress being pulled or carried away. The worst that will happen is you will learn that the child is a brat fighting their parent, or, you might save a child's life.

I was fighting and yelling with all I had and it wasn't until I saw my mom and started yelling for her that anyone noticed it was serious and I wasn't just being a brat.

never underestimate the power of the care of the other stranger adults in the vicinity. they will all, or most, rush to help.

When my mom started yelling everyone around rushed to help.

Ultimately: Children are people. Listen to them. Pay attention. Don't assume anything. Better to look like a meddling ass than fail your duty and a life be ruined or lost.

fuck, pepper, that was a scary story.

It is only in hidsighgt that I realsied what was really happening. At the time I was just being defiant against this jerk pulling on me and was trying to put me in trouble for nothing. I probably sort of knew.

I remember you telling this the first time. As soon as I read the few lines I knew. Scary stuff though.

When I was a kid, I threw one of those tiny plastic bathroom chairs that children use to reach the basin at my brother. I broke the window only because he ducked, but I'm glad he did.

I didn't know I told that story before.

You did, but I don't remember in what thread. I remember being scared for you.

So glad you got away, pepper. That's sick. People who have to hear the child abduction stories, and sort those children out after terrible experience are so brave. It's like working the ER or State trooper- the car crashes and carnage they witness! *shutter* But worse, well a different kind of terrible. To help those children bare the burden. To listen, and not break down and run away. You just have to keep thinking that it's about the child. But still...oh lord, it can be a terrible world.

You have inspired me to watch this again, after 2 decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_Land

I'm sure on some level you knew something was wrong with the way he was speaking to you and holding on to you like that. But I'm glad you were that defiant kid yelling out and trying to squirm away. I'm sure a lot of kids would shut down in that situation.

Here's a fresh one for you guys. It's still pretty disastrous, but everything's fine now. I'm pretty iffy on the details, but this is what happened from what I gathered.

My brother got into an accident last night. He and his friend were both wearing seatbelts, thank God. The car flipped over on the freeway (not sure how the fuck) and I'm not sure if it was because someone hit them, or if they flipped and someone hit them after, but the driver in the other car wasn't lucky enough to be wearing his seatbelt. He flew out and got pretty banged up (some head trauma from what I heard) and ended up in the hospital. He's fine now and everything, and my brother and his friend just hit their heads. Reviewing the accident on scene, the cops detected no alcohol in my brother's system (thank Christ) and they determined that he was not at fault. He's really shaken up right now and things are okay, besides his totaled car and the guy that I'm pretty sure is still in the hospital, going through some tests (this guy is truly the lucky one).

When I heard, I think I realized I haven't truly FELT anything in a looong time, because I honestly just didn't know how to react. I sort of just continued my day as it was. But at the moment my mom was telling me, in a voice that sounded stressed, she just started with "Tenemos un angel de la barda," an expression I'm not too familiar with, but I understood "angel." Then she said my brother was in an accident. For that second that I thought he was dead, I felt actual emotion for the first time in a long time. Thankfully, she followed with "he's fine, and so is his friend..."

Fuck. I'm having trouble processing how to feel about this right now.

I am glad your brother is okay.

When my sister had appendicitis a few years ago no one told me until a week after the fact. I remember not knowing how to process it, the main thing I ended up getting upset over was no one telling me except as an after thought. To which it was responded, by the family member who told me, that she was fine so why make a deal? It was the same when she overdosed when she was teenager, though I knew about that right away.

That is completely different, but I guess the same feeling of not knowing what to feel about someone close being in a life threatening situation but making it out fine.

You almost died. But you didn't, which I am grateful for. How am I supposed to respond in my own heart about this?

Exactly. There's no general social guideline for how to respond internally for something like that. But for an instant, I felt something. That which I inherently value was almost taken from me. Nothing has made feel that way for so long. High school, maybe. Then I realize I don't value anything. Nothing brings the emotions out anymore, save for these extreme, obviously significant occurrences. I haven't cried in nine years. I came close today.

So glad your brother is alright.

That's a long time. What was the last thing you cried about?

You could take it as prompt to evaluate where you are focusing energy and whether you should put more into things that you find important.

The evaluation may find that you are doing just fine, or you may find that there are things to drop and not worry about.

Life is Short in includes the harsh fact that it can end abruptly- not just that it whizzes by and then you are old and nearly done.

Thanks. I was grateful enough to thank someone I don't particularly believe in.

I can't quite place it. It was a multitude of things, but I think the real catalyst was that I thought my dad didn't love me anymore or something. Of course, that wasn't the case. He was just extra pissed. I just remembered feeling so alone, because before that incident, it seemed like everyone was leaving. Particularly my best friend and my aunt's boyfriend, the latter being a man that had taught me so much, and had very sexy twins for daughters. I remember sleeping in the same bed with those two. Unintentional first-time second base. Could you imagine how legendary it would've been to get into my first threeway with twins when I was thirteen? Damn. Just the thought of that lost opportunity... *sniff*...

Pretty much what I've been doing these past 24 hours.

Underlined part I started laughing at, by the time I read the rest I was really laughing, but at you a little more than with you, thinking *oh no Lib, over did it on the story/joke. Should have just left it...*

It's unfortunate that we sometimes can't help but dance to that shadow. I think of the car trying to get away from the police, the one that took out the no parking sign right beside me and brushed my pant leg, me feeling nothing at all in that second and watching a car disappear in front of me it was moving so fast, the no parking sign spinning through the air along with the dirt it had been buried in, and all of it seemingly unreal for the headphones I was wearing at the time--thinking: damnit, this is gonna make me have a three day long existential crisis that is completely, completely fucking irrelevant.

And some fat guy with his mouth hanging open is like, "Damn yo you got a horse shoe up your ass," and I'm thinking, Nooo. What the fuck? I almost got hit by a car. The almost was lucky. The car part fucking wasn't. It evened out. If anything happened here, it was that nothing happened. Now stop gawking at me so that I can deny that this affected me in peace.

His post and experience is one that I am highly likely to be biased over. I realsied this with every word I typed to him, though chose to type all those words without a disclaimer of my bias.

Everything from the Brother part, to the Rollover Accident part, to the Near Fatal Head Trauma part. My own similar story includes Fatal Head Trauma. Honestly, I could barely make it through his post, and How to Reply was quite the question.

What is your opinion of Bias, Night?

It wasn't so much the incident itself, but rather the idea that it took an incident, or near incident, to spark something inside me. It revealed more about myself than the world around me. (Fight Club philosophy shite coming up!) Like the whole, "How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" Link it to the whole, "You never truly know someone until you see how they respond in a crisis."

I don't know, but yeah, from what you guys are talking about, I guess there is no correct response beyond, "Oh, shit, my brother's car got totaled, and he's really freaked out right now. Poor guy. I should help in any way I can. But I can't, because he's six hundred miles away. Oh well. He has friends and family with him. He'll be fine. Time to apply for that job."

I, uhhh... wha? If you laughed, isn't it better with the rest of it?

overall it was funny as a whole, but the first part was funny on a 'Is he serious or making a joke, we may never know?' level, the second on a well played self depreciation TMI level.

One or the other would have done, together it was too much.

Aw, but the other can't be without the one.

This is true, too much mystery is fucking annoying. Serious.

It makes for interesting characters, but I try to be as unbiased as I can. It's very unCanadian to be patriotic, I think, to believe your country is great because it's your country. It's great not because I'm from here but because it possesses the appropriate elements: peace, freedom, equality, that are required for a country to be great. Nor would I sympathize and feel the need to help out a family member just because they're related to me. I have a cousin who is in the hospital down the road and has been for days, and I have two dying grandparents. I will visit none of these people because they exhibit no qualities that I'm interested in. The ideal, the impossible, a real enlightenment, would be for my being white, straight, male, Canadian, tall, bald, to have nothing at all to do with me and to affect me as little as possible, that I can more thoroughly become what I will to be myself rather than what exists beyond my control. Unfortunately, it's hard not to be sexist, racist, and homophobic; I have scars on my head from hitting it on low ceilings, I think Americans are insanely fanatic, I've become immune to the cold, and I'm offended by men with good hair.

When someone loses a loved one to, say, ball cancer, and then they start raising money to spread awareness for ball cancer, I consider it flawed logic, insincere in its senselessness. Of course, I don't say this, as it's a sensitivity issue, and I know that the very mention of some diseases will remind some people of enough pain that they might be saddened for days.

But what I'm really thinking is: you only care about this because it happened to happen. You didn't care to stop cancer, knowing it could strike at any second, and then it struck and, presented with no new information, but subjected to the experience, it changed you. In another world, instead of ball cancer, maybe the loved one died to being attacked by reefer maddened lesbians, and the crusade in that world is against drugs. The person molded by such experiences is fallible; they are just waiting for the world to change them, and it will, and they will die in some shape designed by chaos.

Which might be necessary, to the extent that killing thousands with a bomb, for some people, is easier than pointing a gun at one person and pulling the trigger. You can cover the moon with a finger, it's so far away, and that perception is nine tenths of reality must be taken into account when examining any human endeavor. People can tolerate millions of people starving to death, just so long as they don't have to look at it, and those same people can kill thousands with the press of a button because they don't have to watch them die. They don't care about cancer until a loved one dies. And maybe people wouldn't work so hard if they weren't bias. Maybe we wouldn't have the cures we have, maybe those cures were won through mostly personal battles, people fighting the shape tragedy took while tragedy itself is unscathed; but I'm also thinking that if more people were the other way, maybe we could care about things without having them affect us directly, a people less likely to press the button, more coldly able to pull the trigger.

Batman is the one way; I'm the other way. If I were Batman, it would not be because my parents were murdered, but because Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered. I would attempt to kill the Joker, as a utilitarian of moral intelligence assessing his likelihood to commit mass murder, untouched by the bias toward murder that makes Batman Batman, and it would be a short lived, crappy comic book series, because damn bias, you make for interesting characters.

The problem I have is that experience can't be better than knowledge. If it is, then being a writer is an inadequate take on life. One cannot experience everything, and a writer has to be able to write anyone and everything. If the bias is required to care, to believe, then men can't write women, women can't write men, grown ups can't write children, I can't write the suffering of a disease because I haven't had a loved one die from it, and I can't write being pregnant because I don't have a uterus, and I can't write queers because I don't fiend for the cock; it becomes impossible to achieve universal truth through writing fiction. If experience is so necessary, only a guy who works at Burger King can write a guy who works at Burger King, only he knows what that's like, and that just can't be true. Writing, and my existence, demands that knowledge be sufficient, and when I see a person filled with passion, who knows no more than they knew days before when they were without passion, I see an open display of knowledge being insufficient, at least insofar as it was insufficient to motivate that person. It is a slight against my god.

I am in the process of removing myself from needing to care about every sick cousin and dying grandparent. I only have one grandparent left so I actually do not wish to remove myself from that, as I care whether I like to care or not, but the overall sentiment is that- self removal from the inane.

Knowledge is in fact everything. And I find Chaos to be fatally beautiful.

I spend an absurd amount of time attempting to examine my own bias and respond to the world in a way that shows I am, if nothing else, aware of it. Sometimes I wonder too, how much this is actually to my own detriment. If we are to talk of change, how much may I be forcing change of myself by overcompensating for my own bias? I didn't mention my brothers accident to in response to Lib's post because to do so was pointless, no matter how similar the situation, the outcome was so different that my own emotions over reading the post were rendered obsolete. Responding with a mention of my sister overdosing as a kid was more similar to his situation, for no reason other than the ultimate outcome.

I think, if the goal is to be an objective unbiased observer for the sake of writing, for the sake of observation alone even, even if nothing is written down, then in a way one should revel in the unadulterated bias of the masses around them... how else will one understand what it is to be a transwoman or sociopathic killer or a middle-aged middle america housewife? By objectively drowning in the biased stories of all these real life really breathing characters.

How would you write of the mentally challenged McDonalds worker if not contemplating the depths of "Do You want Fries With That?"

EDIT: @Night

So... you have bias... against experience.

lol, more simply put ^

Me too. Best part.

I think, if the goal is to be an objective unbiased observer for the sake of writing, for the sake of observation alone even, even if nothing is written down, then in a way one should revel in the unadulterated bias of the masses around them...

Definitely. If I meet a plumber, I learn everything they can teach me about plumbing, and then I move on. If the person doesn't stop talking, I don't say anything. I asked a coworker what he knew about me, after knowing him for a few months, and he looked at me shocked, realizing then that he knew nothing at all. I knew everything about him, about his family and his wife and his degree in meteorology that couldn't get him a job and how he dealt with that. I just find it exhausting to socialize, and so preferable to read an essay written by someone who has taken the time to be concise and intelligent on the subject they wish to discuss; at the same time, I've lent my ear to many a raving lunatic.

I have this problem. All of these problems.

I am often completely disgusted with myself with the amount I say about myself here, the only reason I can find for my doing so is that I am writing it down.

A few months ago my neighbor down the block, who I know only as a "hello! You are walking by m house and I am out front so I must say Hello! person." told me every detail of her DUI standing in my front yard, every detail of her side of the story and her feelings on it and how it all happened and why it happened and how she is moving forward and her embarrassment to it being in the local newspaper...

Which is when I said, Oh. I don't read that particular paper regularly.

And then she realsied I had no clue until then, but went on to talk for another twenty minutes about it trying to reconcile what she had just admitted to me.

edit- people will learn the superficial facts of my life easily, as I have found the necessary to getting along.

Again, @Night

Well, here's something you can mull over. The "Nature fakers controversy." Teddy Roosevelt had some interesting things to say on the subject of Jack London. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article.

After four years of privately denouncing the popular nature writers in letters and conversation, Roosevelt decided to weigh in publicly; while alerting Burroughs that he had finally broken his silence, he wrote: "I know that as President I ought not to do this".[64] He had given an interview to journalist Edward B. Clark, who quoted Roosevelt in the article "Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs" in the June 1907 issue of Everybody's Magazine. Roosevelt not only spoke out against Long, but other authors like Jack London and Roberts, who wrote what he called "'unnatural' history".[65] Roosevelt popularized the term "nature faker" over Clark's original spelling, and defined it in his essay as "an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that [the nature faker] completely deceives many good people who are wholly ignorant of wild life. Sometimes he draws on his own imagination for his fictions; sometimes he gets them second-hand from irresponsible guides or trappers or Indians."[66] He voiced displeasure with and disbelief of London's descriptions of dog fighting in White Fang, as well as Long's stories about Wayeeses the wolf taking down prey; Roosevelt was so specific as to debate the depicted outcome of the fights based on the size of the animals involved.[67] Long's books in particular were deemed a "genuine crime", especially against the country's children. Fearing that a curriculum including sentimental nature stories would corrupt young children, Roosevelt wrote: "As for the matter of giving these books to children for the purpose of teaching them the facts of natural history—why, it's an outrage."[21]

Listen, I know Jack London was a dirty socialist, racist and even worse... from California. But don't tell me he could not write about nature. I know nature. I watch National Geographic shows. I record the Dog Whisperer.

Listen. I love London. But the dogfighting scenes were, without a doubt, ridiculous. Had London ever even seen a dogfight? Ha! I'm sure Teddy had. He probably even organized them... when he was, like, twelve, as a get rich quick scheme. It was a different time.

I often relate the last dogfight in White Fang to a boxer fighting a brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner. Amirite, UFC fans?

Whatever.

Back to disasters... this is a relatively recent result of my stupidity. The same summer I bruised my shin bone doing something my parents pointedly forbade me from doing, I gave myself a 2nd degree burn doing something else my parents told me not to do. I think I was 17 and I was kind of worried they would ground me, so I pretended I was fine for a few weeks and tried to take care of my injuries myself. Oh, and I also went to Six Flags and rode a splashy water ride, effectively soaking the improperly cared for peeled burn with theme park water that had been boiling in the Texas summer heat and had had old candy and sweat sticky children periodically dipped into it.

It was fucking gross water, is what I'm trying to say. So obviously it got infected with some bacteria normally only found in the Amazon jungle. I let it get real bad before I got worried. By the time I went to the doctor, I was running a high fever, my entire leg was striped red, and hurt so much couldn't move it. The doctor had to scrape the infected scab off. It hurt.

So that's how I almost lost my left leg just to avoid hearing my parents say, "I TOLD YOU SO."

Were you never I shorts around them?

When I was seventeen I told my mom I was moving out, went to school, came home three hours later and she had all my things packed in her van and a friends van, told me I didn't even need to go in, and wanted to know where we were going.

That sounds like a lesson for a braty teenager. I had actually rented a room though. So we went, and I was moved out like that.

Jesus, Jess!