Quick Mid-day Post

I haven't been online much during the days lately, but I needed some time to calm my shaking hands today. It's a miracle that I'm alive to write this at all, and I say that only half-jokingly.

This morning my roommate had to appear in court to testify against the kids we nabbed trying to rob a car a while back (see Sun. Nov. 5th post for background info). We went downtown and found the court. After standing around for a while, my roommate realized that he didn't bring the subpeona thing he had and therefore, we had to go back home to get it. That's where life got interesting for us all and almost came to an end on multiple occassions.

My roommate is not a good driver. In fact, he's pretty awful. This isn't just my opinion either. In what was almost some eery foreshadowing, the other guy who came to the court with us, Herman, called my roommate's car a "casket" as we were getting out of it at the court house. I mean, it was just two weeks ago when he backed into an apartment building doing a good five miles per hour in an effort to park. He's also side-swiped the curb trying to pull into our apartment building's parking lot, backed into a nice Volkswagen in the hospital parking lot, and, as he told me this morning, after stalling at a red light, allowed his car to roll back into another car as he was trying to start it back up again. Luckily for us all, these small accidents have caused no physical harm to anyone and only minimal damage to his car, other people's cars, and the various stationary objects that he has managed to strike.

There are a multitude of reasons for why my roommate is a bad driver. A few of them are: awful hand eye coordination, inability to do more than one thing at a time (ex. steer and shift gears, steer and press the gas, steer while in reverse, etc.), lack of muscle control (he slams on the brakes and stomps on the gas, there's nothing gradual about either), ignorance of steering dynamics, friction, or the general laws of physics, either a decreased field of vision or the complete loss of sight in one eye, a tendency to overreact, and poor decision making. That's a short list, but you get the idea.

So when you take all this into account, I hope you can get a good feel of the peril I was in. Because not only do you have all of the above in play here, but you also have to consider the fact that my roommate is scared (believing that these kids work for some mophia crime boss who pays them to steal phones and thus will pay someone to stab my roommate on the witness stand, and if you think I'm making that up, first take into account that he asked TWO of us to go with him, and if you still don't believe me, you can call my roommate and ask him yourself, he speaks English) and he's rushed (since it wasn't until he was called to court that he realized that he just might need the official document that summoned him there to begin with). So we went flying down the road doing well over the posted speed limit. Twice we fish tailed. TWICE! And listen, these roads aren't snow covered. There is no black ice on the bridges. It hasn't even rained here in a couple weeks. We're talking about completely dry roads at ten in the morning on a rather warm day and we're in a tank of a vehicle. How he got it to fish tail is beyond me, but to do it twice, and neither time purposefully, is quite a feat. The only thing that surpasses that in greatness is the fact that both times we regained control despite all the odds against us. We were flying both times, my roommate is a horrible driver (see above paragraph), and we were in a car not known for it's handling, braking, looks, gas mileage, well, not known for anything really. But somehow, only by the very hand of God I assume, we safely made the trip from court to house and back to court without any injury to us.

Unfortunately, the guy walking across the street in front of us wasn't so lucky. We had made it to the house and all the way back to the court, surviving both fish tail experiences, and were making the final turn into the street where we wanted to park when my roommate really fouled up. He was making a sharp left turn and was watching some mopeds parked on the corner. I had just said, "Take it slow," when we hit the guy. Luckily, the guy was walking away from us and we just clipped one of his legs with the bumper. It didn't knock him over, which, again, was lucky, because he was an older, frail looking gentleman. But as old and frail as his body looked, his mouth was young and full of spunk. He let into my roommate pretty hard through the window and my roommate did his best to look sorry even though he admitted to being more worried about hitting the mopeds. Classy.

Needless to say, I took the bus home. I got something to eat, studied some new grammar rules (thanks Caesar), and am finally calm enough to venture back out into the world again. It's off to the gym first, and then, after that, I may go try to find someone to practice these new grammar rules on. But you can rest assured, wherever I go, I will be watching for that flying casket on wheels!