We got roughly a half-inch of snow here at Chez Kay from the Storm of the Century(tm). Apparently we were literally on the outer edge of that thing, because everyone was clobbered just a few miles south of us. In fact, there were nine inches on the ground where I work, 36 miles from our house. And some of my co-workers had over a foot. It’s weird, but I’ll take it. We “shoveled” with a broom.
On Friday night I worked until 1:30 am, and as I approached my exit… saw what must have been twenty emergency vehicles with flashing lights in the southbound lanes of I-81. It looked like a carnival of tragedy over there. I was heading north, but could see two cars in a mangled mess as I passed, and it didn’t look good. Not at all. It caused a chill to go up my spine, relieved only by the sack of cheeseburgers I purchased at McDonald’s a few minutes later.
The next morning I shuffled downstairs, and Toney said, “Did you see that big wreck on 81 last night??” Turns out it was caused by a wrong-way driver, and four people died. The newspaper article said it happened at 1:16 am, and I probably passed by there at 2:00 am. Freaky, man.
Check out these two articles about the accident, and pay special attention to the comments at the bottom. We’re very near the end of civilization, right? I sometimes blame all the rage and kneejerk conspiracy theories on the local assholes, but Facebook makes it clear it’s everywhere now. People are goddamn stupid, and CONVINCED they’re smart. It’s not a great combination.
In any case, have you ever happened upon recent carnage on a roadway? Please tell us about it, if you’re so inclined. How many burgers did it take to shake it?
We sent our oldest son to Florida, to spend some time with my parents. He needs a change of scenery, and some time to think. He’s not in trouble, or anything. He’s just 19 and… adrift. Just like I was at 19. Well, actually he’s got his shit together better than I did, but it’s similar. A week away from his friends and normal routine might give him an opportunity for reflection. At least that’s the hope.
I took him to the airport yesterday, gave him a hug, and told him I’d see him soon. And… this morning I spoke with him, and they were getting ready to go on an air boat ride through the Everglades. So, it’s just turning into a vacation. NOT what I had in mind, but whatever.
At what age do you think you truly grew up? I’m still a work in progress, and that’s not really a joke. Toney keeps me from coming completely off the rails, but if it weren’t for her… I think I’d probably still be neck-deep in dumbass. I’ve always been able to maintain a job, and think I’m a decent dad, but am still nowhere near a full-time adult. Oh, I can fake it fairly well, and turn it off and on, but I’m not even in the same hemisphere as the adults of my youth. Do you think they were faking it too? Somehow I doubt it.
Speaking of faking it, I need to go now. The workplace beckons.
Have yourselves a great day, my friends!
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It’s an AIR BOAT!!!!! Not a fan boat. Only Yankees call it that!
Fixed, Douche.
Just spit out my lunch on this exchange.
We got quite a bit of snow in Morgantown. I think some places in WV got 3 feet or so.
I was dumped by a girlfriend several years back, a move I didn’t expect, at the beginning of a weekend at her place. I came upon an accident involving a car and a motorcycle on my way home and it was clear the motorcycle rider was dead, or wasn’t going to live the life he had before the accident. But I’m pretty sure he died. It was a gruesome sight.
Anyway, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, having been dumped. My car windows were up, but I still yelled “You got off easy” as I passed the dead or horribly maimed rider. Not a proud–or mature–moment.
I’m still waiting to feel like a grownup. I have a family, a mortgage, an alleged career and I still feel like I’m 15 or 20. It’s only when I try to perform a physical activity a 15- or 20-year-old could do that I actually feel my age.
I grew up around 26-27, when I met my eventual wife.
When I started to think that this might be a forever thing, I was all, “Jesus, if I’m gonna tie her to this boat, I better get my shit together!”
We got fucking pounded with snow here in Reading PA… Asshole deep with drifts higher than 2 assholes
At 53 years of age, I don’t consider myself a fully responsible adult yet, but knowing that none of us is perfect makes my shortcomings a little easier to bear. I prefer that self-knowledge to the stress-inducing days of being a mom to 2 little kids while being employed full time and thinking I could have and do it all.
Nowadays, I count having the bills paid and the kitchen table reasonably clear a mark of pride. It’s one reason why I’m not pushing our older son (just turned 20) to move out/grow up/find a purpose. It took me at LEAST until I was 25 to have enough life behind me to start making my own fairly responsible decisions about how to be an adult, and even then I effed up more often than not. Another couple of years and the story will be different, but for now he needs to try a few things on to see how they fit or go have a (self-funded) grand adventure.
The adults of our youth were NOT faking it. The adults of today are ALL faking it with rare exception. Every time I meet some big, serious, self assured direction giver I eventually learn that they are an anxiety ridden ass-hat extraordinaire with their shit in hidden disarray.
I’m convinced I’d be dead if I wasn’t married. Once on 81N by the airport, a car was in the passing lane coming TOWARDS me! Scared the crap out of me. I have no idea how they even go in the wrong direction…you have to be trying to do it.
Just read the comments sections in those links.
Why is everyone so obsessed with who the driver was? Do they think they’ll know who it is? And what if they do? Just weird.
And then the gun nuts pile on as well. Just a treasure trove of assholiness.
Yeah, Jason, I thought that guy offered a spirited defense of gun ownership rights. I guess he was able to see, contained in comments about a traffic accident, an undercurrent of attack on the second amendment. Sort of reminds me of the War on Christmas: I’m pro-Christmas, and I’m damned if I’ve ever found a single enemy combatant to capture and torture in the spirit of Christian brotherhood. But I’ll kick him in the balls if I ever find him.
John
john, you are my idol! i want to be just like you when i grow up. i’m 81 now, think i’ll make it??
Last summer, around 1am outside of Pittsburgh, car riding along the jersey barrier on our side. I was able to move one lane away from him as we passed each other. it was heavy traffic. I guess he decided to do a U turn behind me and in front of the other clump of cars but was successful. A big cloud of dust and smoke? filled my rear view mirror. All three lanes behind us stopped. we were shaking for about an hour. I read the next morning that there was one fatality. The wrong way driver, I think.
I saw an recently-occurred accident once in Florida that involved multiple fatalities. I remember seeing two pairs of feet emerging from the bottom side of the sheet that was placed on the roadway in an attempt to cover them up. From the article I read in the local paper the next day, apparently there was a partial decapitation involved. I’ve eaten a number of burgers since that day about 15 years or so ago, but I still have not managed to shake it. Why do I get the distinct impression that I’ll be laying on a counselor’s couch relating this same story someday?
This is a link to “Auto Wreck” by Karl Shapiro, which has been a favorite poem of mine for nearly 50 years. Takes less than two minutes to read.
http://mrmullen.pbworks.com/w/page/11313660/%22Auto%20Wreck%22%20by%20Karl%20Shapiro
John
Very Cool. Thanks for the link.
Anyone remember this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQptxygSM8
At a Girl Scout camp out somebody had the 45 and we played it about 1,000 times.
I haven’t actually witnessed a car crash recently. One that sticks in my mind was a car a few hundred yards ahead of me on the NY Thruway. He decided, too late, that he wanted to take that exit. He turned sharply toward the exit, executed a 360 degree rotation or two, and came to an abrupt stop against the Jersey barrier.
I stuck a yardstick into the snow on my back patio, and it read 18-1/2 inches. There were drifts much higher than that. I spent half of Sunday and most of Monday shoveling, and let me say that is young men’s work; I ache. So far this week my work has been closed. The City has cancelled trash pickup for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There has been no mail delivery since last Friday.
Saturday night at about 1:30am, I heard the distinctive sound of tires spinning in snow. I looked out the window, and there was some Einstein in a big 4WD pickup spewing snow everywhere. What a maroon.
Wrong way drivers & crashes are an epidemic in Florida… seems to be happening almost everyday down here…
I’ve seen too many bad accidents but most recently was yesterday morning. I came off a causeway on a back road and was heading into a suicide turn when I saw a lady on the side flailing her arms and screaming into a cellphone. Then I had to come to a dead stop on ice watching the bumper of the Hyundai in front of me get close enough for me to feel my stomach turn. 2 cars ahead was a truck on its side with the driver still stuck inside. It literally JUST happened. Mrs. Flail was trying to get the police and ambulance on her phone but she was so distraught she kept punching the wrong buttons. Some man got out and directed traffic and I was able to cruise through before they closed the road down.
The worst accident I witnessed was on the West Side Highway when some dude went airborne in the northbound lane and ended up in he southbound lane. A helicopter was dispatched because they thought the dude ejected himself into the Hudson river. We finally had to back up on the WSH and take some backroads off of 125th street and loop back around to the highway again.
I felt like an adult in my mid-20s. I think that’s a good time to get one’s shit together.
Oh, and I pulled an “Anti-Jeff” the other day. After I got gas I stayed parked at the pump and went into the store. Now, before you all get on my ass, in my defense, the parking area is poorly lit and backs up to woods. It’s just a creepy spot where I think The Boogens may come flying out of the woods, so I played it safe and stayed in the lamplight. Sorry, Jeff. I shall hang my head in shame.
The Boogens retired and moved to Florida where they’re working for the Trump campaign. They got scared away by the genuinely crazy people who inhabit the area in which you operate. I’ve been to New York.
Good luck,
jtb
Also: RIP Abe Vigoda. One of the coolest guys on TV in my lifetime.
Can I get an AMEN!
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but I feel more or less like an adult now. I’ve been married and divorced, have a mortgage, and quit smoking weed decades ago.
Yeah, I’ve done that stuff a couple of times, and I also used to smoke grass. I’ve gone from more or less daily to semi-annually over fifty years or so, just in time to wake up and find that pot is now legal in my state (of the union, not of mind). All those times I risked crotchal burn by holding the roach down out of site in the car, and now in the Great Pacific Northwest gay married people are walking down the street smoking colossal reefers (jeez, I HOPE that’s what they’re doing) and tweeting each other. So I smoked the weed they harvested by the side of the road and now turn down the hydroponic hyperdrive. So it goes.
John
When I was a twentysomething, my buddies and used to joke that “they should legalize pot and outlaw cigarettes.” Well, now it’s turned out just about like that. I should have been more careful what I wished for.
I feel like an adult relative to much younger, more immature people. On my own, I’m still a kid.
29″ of snow in my yard – northern Shenandoah Valley. We were far from the edge of the storm.
Saw a fatal accident when I was about 8 years-old that put the fear of the Lord in me, so I refused to drive until I was 25.
And at 68 I consider myself responsible enough, but I still haven’t been issued the proper card. Mine still says b-dult – hope to be an a-dult someday.
20+ years ago I was driving home to my parents on Christmas eve. It was snowing but nothing too extreme. Up ahead I could see lots of flashing lights. Came upon a fireman standing on the side of the road holding a stop sign. Eventually he turned it around to the “slow” sign and we proceeded past the police/fire/ambulance/wrecker. The wreck had happened on a bridge. I guess the small village fire department didn’t have a jaws of life. The car that got the worst of it was chained to the guardrail, with the fire truck chained to the front bumper and the wrecker chained to the rear bumper, trying to pull it apart. Merry Friggin’ Christmas.
My sister saw someone trapped and thrashing around in a burning fireball of a wreck and said that stuck with her for a while. Worst I’ve seen is the aftermath of an IRA terrorist bomb, but that’s not quite the same.
We got more than 2 feet. There are 16ft piles of snow nearby.
Driving the U-Haul from NY to DC on a summer night in 1987, I saw a car on fire in the NJ Turnpike median strip. I did what anyone would do: stopped and took a picture. Weeks later, after getting the film developed (remember that?), I saw in the picture that there was a guy standing next to the car, watching it burn.
I received 30″ of snow down here in the Lower Pierogi Belt. Drifts in my driveway were three feet high. It took me all of Saturday and part of Sunday to shovel a path for my car. When the plow finally went down my street at noon on Sunday, it piled compacted snow at the base of my driveway three feet high and about six in depth, as the plow didn’t even come near the foot of my driveway. I had to put my mail delivery on hold, and I’m pretty sure my pelvic floor prolapsed because every since the shoveling I’ve been having . . . um . . . urinary issues. My mind still feels young, but my body continually sends reminders of my true age!
On the upside, the towns around here are like warzones, ill-equipped to deal with all the snow, and we’ve had two days off work so far, and a delay tomorrow morning. Now *that* makes me feel like a kid again!
I’ve seen numerous nasty traffic accidents over the years but the thing that bothers me most is while in the military having to identify three students’ bodies I had who died. Two committed suicide (one by drowning and one who purposely stepped in front of a tractor-trailer doing 50 mph) and one who drove his crotch rocket through a red light and then through the front seats of the car in the intersection. He was decapitated and his head ended up in his helmet on the car’s dashboard.
The newspaper had a photo of the wreck the next day. No one in editing noticed his face in the helmet.
Dad always warned me that drunks and idiots get on the interstate backwards and what lane are they in? The LEFT LANE. Get the fuck over even if its for a mile or two, could save your life. Sheesh, hubster is the worst and I cant convince him otherwise so I’ve decided to enjoy my bitching. I’m getting quite eloquent.
No snow here at Casa Revashane. This beach living might not be so bad after all.
Went to a volunteer orientation for a garden they have here and when asked to tell something interesting about yourself this old bag (not me) says “I campaign for Trump”. Its nice being the youngest in the group, like being a freshman but without the fear.
I think my grow up moment happened when I got my first dog as an adult. No more blasting of the stereo and starting to have to worry about another life that depended on me.
Not funny but true.
Paul Kantner 1941-2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6ht-Oa-Y0
John
Or if you have 15 minutes rather than just 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEsZyO7EW9I
John