Fun with #OkCupid: A dude in the OKC corral (Having a hard time getting over the sound)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Kenny. We e-met through OKC and although we've never gone out on a date, he was inspired by the documentation of my online search for love, that he wanted to come on board and provide male insight into OKC. So here you go ... and now we're here ... HIT IT KENNY!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @casetines
I am having a hard time getting over the sound.
There’s the airbags deploying, the feeling of moving at 35 MPH and then not moving at all, the shock of “What the fuck just happened?” but really more than anything it’s the sound. When I think about it, and I am thinking about it a lot, I have a physiological response of wincing my eyes and cringing. It’s not like anything I’ve really experienced before.
On Saturday I was in a car accident, the first real car accident of my life. I walked away pretty much unharmed, but I look at my car and think “Why the hell am I unharmed?” I am not going to make the seriousness of my accident overly dramatic because I wasn’t picked up in an ambulance and I pretty much just had my car towed out of there, but I do keep thinking about the fact that it could have been a lot worse. It probably should have been a lot worse.
Facing your own mortality isn’t something you do every day, but the reality of how close we are to the end could be just as real on the day you go as it is on every single day before that. You may not be facing it, but it’s there.
That’s probably the closest I’ve ever been to thinking “Wow, I could have died” and I didn’t really know how to handle it. I have been looking at people in a slightly different way. Still engaging in normal conversation, but at the same time thinking “Hmm… I wonder what you would be doing right now if I had died.” I have spent some time looking at the world in a Jimmy Stewart It’s a Wonderful Life kind of way, considering what life-without-Kenny would be like.
It’s basically like when Steve Urkel turned into Stefan Urquelle. (Okay, you can clearly see I haven’t entirely changed.)
I have always thought about what my roommate would do for me if I did tragically pass on:
- Please update my Facebook and Twitter to speak about my untimely passing, after calling my mother of course.
- After that, just go ahead and wipe my entire hard drive.
- Tell my mom that I loved her, that I always ate my vegetables, and that I spoke fondly of home on the regular.
It’s a funny thing when people talk about ghosts and their existence. Like “What do they want?” and “Why would they be here?” but in reality, who would not want to be a ghost for at least a little while? I want to see the comments left on my Facebook page. I want to see if there’s a charity set up in my name. I want to make sure that they did in fact get Boyz II Men to sing It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye at my funeral like I requested. (Followed my Motown Philly, because it’s my party and I’ll die how I want to.)
I would think it’s commonsense that we’d all want to “ghost it up” until at least the funeral.
But there would be no ghosting for me at this time, I made it out okay. My car was totaled, I have to deal with insurance, which I hate, and I have to go car shopping which I hate even more. Plus I keep hearing the sound of it all. Still, not from the moment it happened to the moment I am writing this sentence have I thought I was unlucky.
Holy shit, I am lucky.
I’m not a ghost, I’m not gone, I didn’t leave behind my family and friends. I’m grateful for the fact that I can be sitting down and writing this right now and I can get on with what I have been working so hard for.
People like to use the cliché “Well, I guess you’re here for a reason,” but I think that’s misconstrued or at least not well-enough defined. To me that sounds like there’s some divine plan, like it means that tomorrow I’ll drive by a burning school bus and save a bunch of kids. I don’t personally believe it works like that.
I don’t think we are here for a reason, I think you have to make your own reason. You can’t just expect that because you survived something, that it was because you’re on a path to do something important. There is no path, there’s just your life and what you make of it.
Life isn’t a train that you board when you are born and depart when you die. There’s no set destination or length of trip. When you’re born, you just have to get up and start walking.
When I got over the shock of the accident a bit more, I started to think more about where I wanted my path to go and where I hadn’t yet gotten. I took it into consideration just how close to my own demise I was at any moment and that I better get there soon or I might not get there at all:
- The closest I got to finishing a full-length screenplay was 58 pages.
- The closest I got to being on TV was as an extra an ABC Family show about gymnastics.
- The closest I got to doing stand-up comedy was 25 pages of jokes that I haven’t performed in front of anyone.
- The closest I got to marriage was a two-year relationship where she wanted to get married and I did not think that was such a good idea.
- The closest I got to having a kid was derailed by various forms of birth control.
- The closest I got to having a million dollars was probably like 1,200 bucks.
- The closest I got to climbing Mount Everest was well I climbed this hill once and it probably took like an hour.
- The closest I got to starring in The Goonies was.. .well, that one will probably never happen.
Plus, I only just started Mad Men.
Honestly, not all of those things are really important to me, but I do know what I do want to do immediately: write, travel, do comedy. I know what I do not want to do immediately: die.
That’s a pretty simple list of Things Not To Do Quite Yet.
My grandfather died two months ago, the last living grandparent that I had. He was pretty much the most amazing person that I knew. He lost his right arm (his dominant arm) in World War II and then proceeded to raise a family of five kids, and spent much of his time doing carpentry. Yeah. My one-armed grampa not only had to learn how to write again, he was a straight-up carpenter who loved building things out of wood and he was damn good at it.
If my grampa could survive being shot so badly in the war that they had to amputate his arm, who the hell am I to complain about a car accident that I walked away from unharmed?
The point is, life is always moving.
It’s not about what you’re destined to do, you have to make it all happen on your own. If you’ve got dreams, don’t expect to just drive by them on side of the road tomorrow because “that’s why you’re here.”
You get out what you put in, there’s not just a bucket of success with a note saying “Here you go!”
Just make it happen, because you never know when life is going to just stop in an instant or when you’ll hear that sound for the last time.