Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 3

Age: Fifth grade-ish.

The injury: A stationary truck had its way with me.

The story: As I've mentioned before, my dad looks a lot like this.

And, as I'm so annoyingly fond of pointing out, I used to look something like this. 

The thing is, man-gorillas like my father get a little confused when handling small children, so when it came time to teach me how to ride my bike, my failure was such that my dad rage-quit on the whole endeavor and drowned out his disappointment with TV. This suited me fine, as riding a bike was far too physical an activity for my pudgy frame, and we both reached an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again. This happy ignorance lasted until my family got sick of hearing gunshots every day, and decided to pack up and move from our home in the city of Aurora, Colorado to the nifty little suburb of Centennial. Not only did I have to deal with a substantial amount of culture shock (where were all the kids trying to make me cry?), but it was also my first time living in a suburban environment - a place where virtually every kid rides their bike and you're absolutely hopeless if you can't keep your balance on one. In an effort to adjust to my new home, I took it upon myself to teach myself how to ride a bike.

Suffice it to say, this story wouldn't end up in my childhood pain miniseries if it had gone without some colossal screw up on my part. The short version is that I got the everloving shit beat out of me by a parked truck.

There's a stone-cold killer behind those goofy Pixar eyes. 

The slightly elongated version is this: on the day that I decided to learn how to ride a bike, I took my long-forgotten bicycle out of its dusty corner in the garage and wheeled it to a nearby cemetery, where I spent most of the day losing my balance, eating shit and presumably being laughed at by all the dead people. However, my perseverance began to pay off, and after several hours I had succeeded in keeping myself balanced long enough to be considered adequate at bike riding. Reveling in my victory, I got a bit cocky and decided that the only way to cement my status as a cool kid was to ride my bike all the way to my house.

Here's the thing: I live on a bit of a hill, and as successful as I had been at riding, I hadn't actually bothered to try my hand at braking. So when I got on my street and rapidly started gaining speed, I panicked. Rather than applying the hand brake, I started crying and screaming, my vision quickly blurring as my velocity approached terminal levels. I helplessly zoomed right past my house and continued down the hill, where, to my horror, my path intersected with a rusted out heap of a truck that was parked on the side of the road.

Pic unrelated.

Oh, I tried. I flailed like an idiot, doing everything in my limited power to prevent the inevitable collision. But like most things in this world, I was doomed to failure. 

My face and the side of the truck rushed to meet each other like two long-lost lovers. Unfortunately for me, those lovers were engaged in a highly abusive relationship, so when my face met the truck it raised its proverbial hand and bitch slapped me to the curb with all the force of a fat kid crashing his bike into a truck. My poor bike, ill-prepared for the collision as it was, crumpled into a confused mess of pedals and whatever else a bike is made out of. My only saving grace was that I was wearing a helmet, a positive which was somewhat refuted by the fact that my helmet had left a massive dent in the driver-side door and knocked the rear view mirror off of the vehicle and into the street, where it lay shattered and useless (much like my pride).

After disentangling myself from the misshapen remains of my bike, I assessed the damage that I had done to the truck, whereupon I looked pretty much exactly like this.

Being the responsible young child that I was, I gathered the various pieces of my bike and ran away as fast as I possibly could, leaving the unfortunate truck owner to contend with the consequences of my own incompetence.

I am a burden to society.