random thoughts about random things

… happened as well, just not the way they usually happen, or perhaps they happen that way, just that noone dares to admit it.

This one happened on a wintery night in Modalen, with roads filled with wet snow that made it slick as hell. A young man, that would be me, is heading home from a football-training and a short drop-in at Kjartan’s to say hi and talk crap about anything and everything. The road is, as mentioned, pretty messed up from the wet snow, so our young man, still me, decides to not go at it gung-ho style like he usually does when he’s driving these roads, because the last thing he wants is for shit to hit fans, because he hates messes, and particularly cleaning them up.

Driving up the valley at a decent pace quickly turns boring, but in his wisdom he takes a break-test to see how bad the road actually is. It’s bad. Really bad. So bad that he’s not bored anymore, he’s being really careful. You’re not supposed to slide that far at just 30km/h after all. Driving according to the weather and roads as he better do he gets pretty far, and everything’s fairly merry and nice. Dark as hell, with snow coming at you, some pleasant music in the background, and things aren’t bad at all.

He comes at this long stretch of clear unangled part of road that is perfect for increasing the km/h’s a bit. Which isn’t, strictly speaking, a bad idea. The road there’s straight, broad, and as safe to speed up in as driving usually is, but he didn’t exaggerate, in his wisdom. The problem came when he shifted down one gear for the oncoming turn, putting some minor pressure on the break to slow down the speed so that he didn’t have to gamble with conditions and fans. That went well, it’s just that a few seconds later the poor bastard has to sneeze, most likely at 55km/h maybe a bit less, and an odd instinct comes to the fore, slowing down to avoid accidents, so he hits the break for a mere second or less.

It’s the little things that makes a lot of shit run headlong into fans, creating a badass amount of mess to clean up. In this case it was an old instinct coupled with shitty conditions, creating a pretty crappy situation. Fans tend to evenly distribute the fecal matter excellently.

In any case the car, to his horror, had started sliding just inside the turn. The thought was pretty simple, “Fuck”, and the reaction was to bend down and brace. Hitting the side of the road, which is filled with rocks the size of medicin-balls and bigger, shouldn’t be that bad considering the care he’d put into the speed not being too high, but as with strange physics that’s not much of an issue if you’ve got the right angle when hitting the fan. It still gets messy.

Hitting the side of the road was meant to be a simple thing. The hit would be a small “Whomp” and then a complete stop. The small “Whomp” turned out to be a “Whomp goes the car”, and the front-wheel to the right hit the rock pretty dead on, then went up in a “Whomp” that flipped the car. Another “Fuck” went through his head at this point, because that’s not how it was supposed to go, and stupid as he was he was a bit late at closing his eyes at this moment. A small piece of glass was retrieved later in the evening by the young man’s father. From the lower-right recess of the eye-socket.

The car landed nicely on it’s wheels again. The word “Fuck” crept out of his mouth, immediately followed by a “Wow”, and he looked around at the debris. His beloved car was pretty apparently totalled in several ways. He felt a pang of sadness for the car he’d known his whole life, right before he said “Faen”, and pulled out the cell-phone to call his domestic seniors for help in getting the smoking wreckage off the road.

As he gently exited the car he turned angry, at himself, for not doing one out of a “million” things he could have done to save the car, instead of turning it into the sad sight it was. He had to concede that done was done, but he’d know that for next time, one that would hopefully never come, and he muttered aloud that he was “Pretty fucking glad he hadn’t been driving like an idiot”. He continued to stare at the stuff that’d been pretty shitfanned for a few more moments while going through the mental math of how lucky he was, how not-dumb he’d been, and how stupid he felt for that one shitty instinct.

While looking at the tracks he’d made, he went through the effect of breaking where he had, effectively piling slick snow beneath his tire that created a forward momentum not easily stopped, for a small moment. Enough to not be able to turn properly to follow the road. He had instinctively tried to turn the wheel just a little bit at a time, trying to fool the car into getting back on track, not pulling at it like mad because that would only create a more efficient slide beneath the tire. A metre or so before the hit he’d twisted the wheel in dumb panic at his futile, and surprisingly calm, effort to fix the situation. He was surprised that he’d been calm, atleast before the final wrench of the tire, perhaps in frustration. A moment of pride filled him, and then he stared at the car again, and it was gone.

The rock it had hit managed to force the front-wheel backwards, hampering it’s forward momentum, and punting it upwards in an odd slingshot effect where the car’s left side spun to the side, while the right one was being forced upwards. The time spent on it’s back had been short, although falling back down on it’s wheels had taken some time. The road had been slick, perhaps even more so in that turn, and he counted himself lucky once again as he walked back to the car to put on his awesome mittens.

His father came in the tractor, an angry look and a stressed string of comments came as they made it ready to be towed home, which was expected and understood, a son had been in an accident. Parents never take that lightly, no matter how tough or stone cold they wish to act. Some fiddling with the car, turning it around with the tractor, and the wreckage was swiftly pulled home to be cleaned for things to keep.

As the young man writes a small post for his blog, in an unusual third-person perspective, probably as a means to deal with what happened, share the experience while it’s still fresh and unmuddied, he ponders when, or if, he’ll be able to sleep tonight at all. Alot of things happened, what he could have done instead bothers him. He was really fond of that car, and now it was out there, wrecked and ungraceful because of him. He’d been in an accident, and now he feels apathy.

A sneeze, a small second. All the little things. Still alive, happy to be around. Which is a big thing. Angry, it was a nice car, with lots of sentimental value. Feeling stupid, a bit proud, very happy, a bit sad. Seriously, a sneeze. It begs the question whether to feel stupid for such an odd occurrence, or better for not being another statistical idiot driving retardedly fast.

Thank you for reading.

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