Lucky You?
9I want to hear about your best and worst instances of luck.
Good: My sister and I broke down in LA, near Skid Row. A couple of guys stopped to help us, getting us into their buddies shop, to fix a blown radiator at 4pm on a Friday afternoon. They were from our city, 2 hours away. Weird odds, right?
Bad: There are a lot of these, but I’d say ricocheting off of an office chair onto a glass chandelier that just happened to be on the floor, waiting to be hung, was my worst. It certainly accounted for my most stitches. It was also Thanksgiving, so yeah, that one might be the worst.
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I won the lottery once…
But it was the Draft Lottery.
Both Good and Bad.
So pretty much against my will at the time, I got to be a Veteran, but I also got GI Bill benefits, which paid for school, so all in all, I’ve had a great life with a great career. Sometimes you have to have the long view, even if it is hindsight.
Good: I once took a tumble on a mountain bike so bad that I woke up once when the ambulance was backing up to me and then again once I was in the hospital. My right wrist’s x rays looked like a back alley dice game that the police rolled up on, and I had a sash of road rash diagonally across the front and back of my torso. I saw my bike in the back of my friend’s truck when I came out. The back wheel was folded in half like a taco shell and the front was bent at 90 degrees.
How is that good luck? We were taking the switchback mountain road down Mt. Nebo after riding the trail around the top. Me and a friend on bikes and our third friend in the truck behind us. We left the truck way behind after the first turn.
My friend was ahead of me and I wanted to pass him. At the time I worked in a bike shop for one of the pioneers of aero positioning for bike racers, so I had picked up a thing or two in my time there (along with a shiny new Giant Yukon I’d bought right before this camping trip). So I dropped down parallel to the top tube, tucked my elbows and knees in and pedaled like the dickens. The aero worked a little too well, and as I passed my buddy and gave him the Nelson “Ha ha!” I realized that I was going faster than I could pedal in the top gear of a 21 speed bike. I have no idea how fast that is, but it’s up there.
We’re still a good way up the mountain on a switchback road, remember? I look up and I see the road turning to the right with what I remember as a 400 foot dropoff beyond. The stacks of the nuclear plant at Russellville loom in the distance. I begin applying the brakes as hard as I can.
The last two things I remember are looking down, first at the front wheel and then between my legs at the back wheel, and realizing that neither of them are turning at all, and here I am sliding along still upright at an incredible rate of speed. The next thing I did was look up at the approaching boulders marking the edge of the road and yell “OH SHIT!”
The next thing I remember is waking up and wondering why I was taking a nice, restful nap on an asphalt road. There’s a nice boat beside me attached to a pickup truck, and there’s an ambulance backing towards me. Someone tells me to be still and I go back to sleep. I next wake up in a hospital sitting up with my middle finger in what looks like a Chinese finger trap hung from an IV stand, positioned so my forearm hangs straight down below. A machine is beeping a solid beep that sounds like something has flatlined, and my two friends are looking at me saying “is he dead?” When I open my eyes and ask what’s going on, they tell me I had a wreck and resume playing with all the hemostats and stuff that were laying on the table next to me.
According to my friend behind me, after I yelled I laid the bike over and went wheels-first into a boulder. The back wheel hit first and I spun, bouncing from boulder to boulder but staying on the road. He said it was like a Sonic the Hedgehog loop only sideways. I came to a stop as the road straightened out on the far end of the curve. As he rolled up to me my eyes rolled back in my head and he waited for our friend to catch up in the truck so he could tell him I was dead.
The friend with the truck went off to find a phone and call for help, the boat belonged to a park ranger that he found along the way, and they called the ambulance to come get me.
So the fact that I didn’t careen off a mountain, didn’t die, and only broke a wrist and had some painful road rash made me very lucky that day.
And my job? I built wheels. So once I was back at work, I got to buy a set of rims and build myself a new set of wheels, triple crossing the spokes for maximum strength.
And bad: Yet again on two wheels. Nineteen years later I had saved up and bought myself my dream bike: a Suzuki M109R. This is a mean machine. The back wheel is 10 inches wide with a 330mm wide tire wrapped around it. It has the biggest pistons of possibly any production street vehicle engine and looks like it’s doing ninety when it’s parked.
I’ve had the bike for three days. I decide to go for a ride, and I’m going across town to a friend’s house to show him my new ride.
I’m in the right lane of a four lane plus turn lanes road, a main thoroughfare across town. I’m a block away from an interstate underpass, the speed limit’s 35 and that’s about what I’m doing. The lane is open in front of me, and there are four of five vehicles stopped in the left lane at the red light ahead of me. The light turns green and since there’s no one ahead in my lane, I keep my pace to pass all the traffic to the left.
Not so fast, thinks the douchebag in the gold Tahoe that’s third in line at the now green light. He cuts in front of me without signaling at approximately four miles per hour.
I grab a footful and handful of brakes but it’s too late. Suddenly I’m tumbling down the road and see my new bike sliding ahead of me, throwing a trail of sparks behind it. At one point I try to reach out and grab the road to stop spinning. I remember taking a hit to the back of the head and having time to marvel at how great a job the helmet did at making that not feel bad at all. The Tahoe keeps going. I didn’t hit him. I don’t think the fucker ever even saw me.
I try to get up from my landing spot on the interstate on ramp. A few people are suddenly standing around me, and they ask what I’m doing. I tell them I need to get to my bike, and they tell me I’m not going anywhere. I look down and my jeans are bloody and shredded. My sneakers beat to shit. I wore sneakers for the ride because I thought the shifter felt like it had a hitch in it when upshifting and I wanted to feel it better than I could in my boots.
The ambulance pulls up and an EMT cuts my leather jacket and jeans off and they take me to the hospital. I don’t want the jacket cut but the EMT says it’s toast, it has done its job. Broken left wrist gets a plate. Separated right shoulder. Broken lateral process on a vertebra. Broken bones in my right foot. I’ve damaged every extremity, and this time get to spend a few days in the hospital, a few weeks having to have my dad around to wipe my ass, and a few months getting back to being able to fully work.
The wrecker driver that took my bike to the body shop told my buddy that worked there that there had been an accident at that intersection earlier that day, and there was fresh oil on the ground right where I was having to emergency brake. So I lost traction and those massive tires just slid out from under me.
And after I get out of the hospital, I look at my leather jacket. It actually looked exactly like it did before the wreck, save for being cut in half up both sides. It was just well worn with ten years of breaking in. It was perfect, and I’ve never found another one like it. That maybe hit harder than all the damage to the bike.
If you ride, wear all your gear. Every time. Jeans might as well be made of wet toilet paper, and Adidas are no better than flip flops when the road is beating the shit out of you at an entirely reasonable thirty miles per hour. Too many dipshits text, tweet, Facebook, or even livestream while driving vehicles large enough for them to sit in the driver’s seat while their head is completely up their ass. Being around them on top of two wheels is a huge risk to life and limb.
I believe luck is genetic. I always did well in poker games. Like ALWAYS. I was adopted and found my birth mom when I was about 30. I visited her in California and during that visit she asked me if I liked to go to casinos. She pulled out a lockbox from under her bed that was filled with cash and we went to a local casino and each took $100 to play with. I did well on the blackjack table and later we both hit jackpots on side by side slots on nearly the same spin. We walked out with 10x what we walked in with. I’m now a father and when I my daughter was 5 years old we taught her how to play poker. Her first hand of 5 card stud she drew QQQAK. #genetics
@capnjb please submit yourself to 23andMe so that I can get my new “Winning at Cards” report. I look forward to it.
And if you ever see this guy dealing at your poker game, leave no matter what genes you have.
/image derek delgaudio
I really can’t think of anything that stands out as “bad” luck. I mean, I’ve fallen off of motorcycles, wrecked cars, had a bad marriage, but that’s just “life.”
But Good Luck? How about I was booked into seat 8G on [United 811][1] but, due to a work scheduling mix-up, I had to cancel and re-book for a later flight. Once I landed in Tokyo I learned about United 811 and realized that one of the seats at the bottom of the Pacific was the one I was supposed to be on.
Or, another: I was doing work for the US Navy and was put on a helicopter to go ashore in the middle east somewhere. About a half-mile offshore things got very quiet and we were going into the Red Sea, no doubt.
I had about 30 seconds (seemed like about 12 years) for my life to flash before my eyes, remembering all those movies I’d seen of helo’s going into water. (Google it; it ain’t pretty).
But we went in (fairly) softly and I was shocked that the water was maybe two or three feet deep. So we all shrugged, grabbed our shit, and waded ashore.
“Life’s been good to me so far.” (J. Walsh)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811
@TrophyHusband wow, those are both doozies. May you continue to live a charmed life, especially when it comes to being in flying contraptions.
@djslack Yeah, if I had any sense I’d stay on terra firma.
I didn’t even mention the time I was on a shipwreck (collision at sea) in the North Atlantic and had to be rescued by Zodiac from the freezing waters. (See: HMS Penelope)
But now I’m thinking… How in the hell did I ever make it this far down the road, all these brushes with the Grim Reaper?
Good luck and bad luck at the same time.
Bad luck: when I was sixteen, a drunk in a truck ran a stop sign and ran into the side of our car. Totaled the trailer (we were going camping) that was fifty hours old. Totaled our car. My parents got me out of the car (I was wedged between the front and back seat on the floor) right before it caught on fire.
I had a broken back.
The drunk died, leaving behind a wife and young children.
Good luck? I walked away. I ended up in the hospital for a couple of months, lost an inch in height, but I was okay.
Another one.
Bad luck: On my way to Disneyland for a girls’ weekend. Not even ten miles from home, a guy in a truck pulls into my lane. I was in his blind spot. I turned the wheel, a little too fast, I guess and, even though the car was headed in the right direction, it kept sliding to the side. It hit the curb (I was on a freeway), both passenger tires blew out, the car kept sliding on the wet grass, rolled over on it’s way down the embankment, hit a fence, which had the car doing a 180° and landed on the passenger side, driver side towards the sky. (I joke, I landed my car at Miramar, because I was on their property at that point.)
I was hanging by my seatbelt.
Good luck? The guy who caused the accident is the one who got me out.
And I walked away. Car totalled.
I’m not sure I’m a subscriber to bad luck. I’ve had my share of unfortunate events… but here I am. Married 20 years to apparently the world’s most patient woman and have the most amazing daughter who is off the scale in brilliance and also has an incredible fast ball (that I can’t hit). If it was bad luck that brought me here. I will sign up 100 times out of 100.