I like to joke around (ya think?) and kind of tongue-in-cheek wonder why my kid is so freaking dramatic, when I know exactly from whence it came. I am guilty. I can’t help it. Just like some statements are better punctuated by a good “fuck” or “motherfucker” to get your point across, so also is a good story made better by a little drama. HOWEVER…..I cannot help it when drama finds me, or rather, when the smallest incident somehow evolves into a near death experience. These things happen, for real. How do you think reality shows are made?

It’s amazing how you can come as close to death as you’ll probably ever be and not only live to tell about it, but live to tell it about on several different occasions. I guess some of us just have those kinds of lives where exciting and dangerous things happen to them all the time (I don’t know any of those people). Like every day is an episode of Charlie’s Angels (or a reality show full of 30-somethings who think every day is an episode of Charlie’s Angels. How pathetic would that be…). For example….

BFF and I were almost killed…..

by a Brown Recluse Spider. It was lying in wait for us as we walked outside the mortgage company we worked for….intending to take a break, smoke a cigarette (us, not the spider)….just sitting there, being all cunning and lethal about it. We’d heard that they have a tendency to jump from place to place (though, this being our first BRS sighting, how would we have known that beforehand?) Naturally there was screaming, jumping (uh, us again, not the spider) and a dash inside the building to relate to all who would listen (and those who feigned indifference but were really secretly interested) how we were almost killed by a Brown Recluse Spider.

See? Cunning and lethal.

by sharks in Long Island Sound. Yup…we went to Calf Pasture Beach (I know…the name is ridiculous) in Norwalk, Connecticut and weren’t quite sure if there were sharks or not….so in we ventured with all of our jewelry on (What? Surely you share our love of going to the beach fully accessorized??) sunglasses included….just creating shark-attracting flashes of bling all over the place, totally oblivious to the fact that man woman eating sharks were probably circling us deep underneath the water, licking their chops (do sharks even have tongues?). Only we know how close to death we were that day.

I'm sure the ones that may or may not have been circling us looked just like this

by what appeared to be a rogue kangaroo running alongside the Taconic State Parkway. I have no explanation for this except to say that it was utterly terrifying.

by Fidel Castro…um, or Cuba itself, I’m not all that clear on which one presented the most danger here. We were in Cancun, happy to sit at the beach everyday drinking ourselves into an afternoon nap that it didn’t occur to us until it was too late (too late for what??) that we were uncomfortably close to Cuba, which we knew to be very bad, and by extension, MUST be very dangerous. What if Fidel decided to bomb the U.S. and missed his intended target (which, logically, would be the Pentagon or something) and instead aimed right for Cancun?? What if he sent his flunkies (and you know he has flunkies…though maybe he calls them minions) to the U.S. with some Latin Anthrax (Lanthrax?) and some leaked out of the envelope (where else would you find Lanthrax?) and got into the water (oh right, we didn’t drink the water)…..okay, but you see where I’m going with this, right? It totally could have happened that way…or in some other improbable and ridiculous, but still 100% possible way. We were lucky to get out of that banana republic with all of our duty-free intact.

Bad bad Fidel

by a nasty fall in an employee kitchen….Well, this one was all BFF (who has this odd tendency to fall….All. The. Time.) I don’t know what it is with her, but she just falls. And not always on carpeting, or a nice soft bed of leaves or anything non-fatal-injury-inducing…it’s always on hard tile or outdoor steps or something….she could be killed every single day actually just by leaving her house. I always walk away quickly when this happens. Besides trying to avoid the obvious humiliation that BFF just couldn’t stay on her feet….again…it’s also so that she doesn’t try to pull me down with her. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could.

by car exhaust. As a friend of mine and I sat in her car smoking after a storm that had just dumped a foot of snow on the streets of New York City, I smelled car exhaust (over the ganga – so you KNOW it was a close call)….looking around, I wondered how we were smelling the car exhaust so acutely when ALL OF THE WINDOWS WERE CLOSED. There wasn’t much panicking however, as we both were pretty much “huh….that’s odd” (you know, as we slowly turned a sickly shade of gray blue…and not that nice military gray blue, more of a right-before-the-formaldehyde-replaces-your-bodily-fluids kind of blue), taking our time figuring it out…..neither one of us thinking at all about the dual exhaust pipes that were totally clogged with snow, thus allowing the deadly fumes to back up into the car. I’m convinced that by the time we finally put the windows down a half inch, about 5-6 minutes later, we were moments from death.

by a stray bullet shot from the gun of the officer who had pulled his at the gas station we just happened to be passing on our way to a bar one night. I mean, what if that suspect had bolted?? What if he had pulled his own weapon?? The cop would have had to shoot him and God knows where the bullet would have ended up….a bush, the plate glass of the store, our heads….Christ, that was a crazy night….driving by that gas station…

All I’m saying is: You never know if death is going to show up in the form of Australian wildlife alongside a state highway.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 12:34 am and is filed under Total Randomness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.