A date with the assclown

Wednesday

A court date, that is. To understand why I was downtown in traffic court YET AGAIN, the day before going out of town no less, exchanging greetings and bundt cake with my old friends the state trooper, state's attorney, and other various law enforcement officials, let's go back to last summer. July 21st, to be exact......

- - - - - - - - - - (cue Wayne's World-esque dootoolo dootoolo dootoolo music)

"It's really been a perfect kind of day."

That was my mistake. Everyone knows that if you make a comment like that, you have to immediately spit three times or knock on wood or bite the head off a grasshopper or something. I of course did none of those things, which is obviously why fate felt it was perfectly acceptable to come along and send the proverbial bucket o' crap and pestilence pouring down on my head. Normally I'm not that careless; I'm not sure what lured me into a false sense of security. Maybe it was the shock of in fact having had a day as perfect as it gets in TashaWorld. Recall, this was after a summer of near-drownings, bee stings and the like in my quest for Ironman Glory. So the fact that I had successfully done the Evergreen tri that morning and did NOT drown, that Robyn and I had then stumbled on a cool estate sale in the lovely area around Evergreen Lake, that we had a little while earlier stopped at Dairy Queen and were now wending our way back to Chicago all happy........these are what pass for miracles in my life.

So we're driving along on I-55, nearing the city, and I'm thinking how cool it is that we'll be back early enough so that I can kick back and have a relaxing evening, when.......well, I don't know what sound effects to use to convey having someone (the aforementioned assclown) slam into your car at full speed, because traffic has slowed and oops, assclown apparently isn't looking at the road AT ALL, so he slams into you with no warning, no brakes, which spins your car around and then some other car hits you head on which triggers the airbags and then you spin around some more and finally come to a stop (all of this figured out afterward, as it wasn't clear at the time what the sequence of events was). So imagine that sound. Robyn saw what appeared to be smoke coming out of the dashboard so she bustled quickly out of the car, while I sit there thinking, what the fuck?? Yeah, I'm bright that way.

When I finally get out, I look behind me and see our own little Armageddon on the highway. All lanes of traffic shut down. Several cars scattered about. One car is about 15 feet back, on the other side of the road, overturned. A woman is pulled up right behind us, and at first I'm a little short because I think she's the one who hit us, but she's not, she's just a good samaritan. As we're standing there trying to figure out what happened, and after I get a cold Coke bottle out of my now-destroyed car to hold to my nose, which feels broken, something happens to give me a very warm, fuzzy feeling towards humanity: an overfed sunburned mustached yuppie-wannabe with his mousy wife and mewling brats in his needlessly big SUV going the OTHER direction on I-55, who has been stuck in a gapers' block for all of about ten minutes, looks over at the carnage on our side. And in looking at the smoke and destruction, at a scene where one would surely assume that there's a very good chance that several people have been killed, is so irate that their Big Plans to hit the waterpark and Chuck E. Cheese's are now thrown off by those all-important ten minutes, has the thoughtfulness and wherewithal to very angrily yell "Thanks a lot for screwing up traffic!!!" at us. The three of us who are standing there in shock, me holding a Coke bottle to my nose. Whoever you are, Mr. Wannabe Yuppie POS, I feel sorry for your having to go through life as you. How pathetic that must be.

So I've started to go over to the overturned car where people have been working to get the people there out, and the firetrucks pull up very quickly and suddenly I'm surrounded by good-looking hunky guys in firefighting gear asking if I'm okay. Well. This is getting interesting. I find out that by some miracle, no one is seriously hurt and they're just taking the guys from the overturned Durango to the hospital to check them out. Once the firefighters find out that no one was killed, things get a bit more jovial, and as the tow trucks are moving cars out of the way so that traffic can have more than just the one lane to get by, we stand around and chat, with one of them asking me if I've just escaped from Joliet (the prison), since I'm still in my tri gear and thus my race numbers are still visible on my leg. I like these guys.

The state trooper tells me that the assclown who caused the accident, who, for simplicity's sake, why don't we just call "Eric Strickland," is on his cell phone. And has no insurance. And no driver's license. Oh, he's also a convicted felon, but I don't find that gem out until court date #1. Beautiful. Now, wouldn't you think if you have all that going for you, that when you do illegally get behind the wheel of a car to go somewhere, that you might actually......PAY SOME FUCKING ATTENTION? But maybe that's just me.

Eventually, Robyn and I manage to find someone who can stash all our tri stuff in his car and give us a ride back home (thanks Mark Watkins!!), and as we're waiting for him to pick us up from the accident turnout on the side of I-55, I take a little spin around on Precious to make sure she's okay. Priorities, you know.

Of course, since assclown (aka "Strickland") had no insurance, I now have no car, no rental car, no way to get around, and a deep ankle bruise that I get to limp around on for a couple of weeks. And while I'm indeed grateful to be alive, people keep reminding me that I should be happy to be alive, and I think - is that all I get? My friends who have just gotten married, are having kids, have cushy jobs, etc and so on, are telling me "be happy you're alive." So they get everything - I get "well, I'm not dead yet." Somehow that strikes me as a little unfair.

Anyway, I digress.

(to be continued)