Snoqualmie

Slow the fuck down part III.

I got a call from my mom this afternoon, telling me that my dad had been in a car accident. He flipped his Miata over with the top down on a canyon stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, and was taken to UCLA Medical Center. The second call an hour later clarified: he's alive, awake, and without evident brain or spinal cord injuries. That's great; he's phenomenally lucky.

Lucky, that is, that all that happened was being dragged along the pavement on his face and fracturing his eye socket. Apparently he's going to need surgery today just to put some skin back on his face and then he'll be looking at further plastic surgery later on. From the sound of my mom's voice on the phone I think she had one panic attack when she heard he'd been in a car accident and then another when she got a first look at him. Being a speech & hearing pathologist who's worked with head injury patients for years, of course, she's mostly concerned about his eyesight, hearing, and, you know, brain. Those things are okay. I reiterate, that's great.

I am looking very pointedly at certain friends of mine who consider themselves sport drivers and connoisseurs of canyon roads. My dad is fifty years old (turning 51 next Sunday, in fact). He's been driving for more than thirty years and since I've been alive I haven't known him to get into a single accident until today. When I hung up the phone and started listing all the injuries that he managed to avoid in the course of this accident, Jacob said, "So it sounds like this was basically a wakeup call?" Yeah, pretty much, but not the kind that you wake up and walk away from. It's the kind where they have to jack up your mangled car just to get you out from under it and into an ambulance, and you wake up in the hospital glad to be mostly in one piece. Do you see my point here, guys?

If you're the next person I care about to get into a horrific car accident, you'd better either have incontrovertible proof that your driving was flawlessly safe or post a bodyguard at the hospital, because otherwise I'll come and beat you up some more. Slow down and drive like you know you're a 150-pound monkey operating a 2,000-pound explosive device. If you can't do that, stay off the damn road.