Cars and bikes.

So I was hit by a car last Friday. It wasn't so bad. The story basically is that I was riding my bike along the sidewalk on Dovercourt, looking for a convenient traffic light or crosswalk to get over the street with so that I could start riding in the bike lane. I found a crosswalk at Dovercourt and a street called Shanley, stopped my bike, hit the button, waited until I saw traffic come to a stop and then slowly rode across the street. It was broad daylight.

A lady in a van then turned from the intersection and plowed straight into me with the front-left side of her car. I screamed "What are you doing?!" as I got dragged along for a bit before somehow, via either luck or spontaneous acrobatics (I like to think the latter, but most likely it was the former), I stumbled off the side. After hitting me the lady hit her accelerator and slammed her car into a fence, doing some seriously impressive damage to it.

I came out of that with a few badly scraped knees and an injured foot, but nothing so bad that I couldn't walk out of it by my own power. The local people called the police and the paramedics wrapped a bandage around my largest wound. The lady's been charged with some sort of offense and I fully intend to have her pay for my now-destroyed bike and the pair of jeans that was torn in the accident.

But geez... not to be a drama queen or anything, but that fence was bent 90 degrees. If I hadn't stumbled off the side of the car five meters earlier, that shit could have killed me.

I am someone who often wonders whether or not there's any rhyme or reason in the world. I consider whether certain things happen for a reason or if everything that happens in the universe is just a series of dice rolls. That sort of thing. I sometimes like to think that there's method in the madness of the world and that everything is just a story inside a story, but man is there any greater counterpoint to that than being run down by some lady's van? I didn't die, of course, but according to Google 39,185 people weren't so lucky back in 2005.

Whole thing makes me think of that scene in the Dark Knight where Harvey's flipping his scraped coin to decide who lives and who dies. I guess that sometimes that's all life and death can boil down to. Some people end up between the car and the fence while others don't.

Strange world we live in.

Anyhow, I'll post a pic of my destroyed bike later on.