An Update On My Progress With My Drawing Tablet

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering An Absurd Amount Of Pain: A Miniseries - Part 6.5

"You need to go," Death intoned. His voice boomed in my head, reverberating off the walls of my skull.

"Nyagh?" I responded eloquently. I'm sure I had a response mapped in my head, but my motor functions were somewhat dampened by the fact that my arm had basically been reduced to mashed potatoes. Except in this case, the bacon bits were pieces of gravel embedded in my flesh and the gravy was actually my own blood. This is in keeping with a food theme that I introduced in the beginning of my last blog post, which was like two years ago. What I'm trying to say is I'm an inconsistent piece of garbage when it comes to my writing efforts. Anyway.

Meh.

I turned to face the Grim Reaper. Well, I say "turned" like it was a simple thing for me to do, when in reality I mostly flopped around like a fish having a seizure until I was sort of facing the right direction. My vision was slowly starting to clear up, and Death gradually came into focus. He was tall, slim, dressed in black garb, and...uh. Balding?

"You know, MOST people were kind enough not to point it out."

In fact, the more my sight cleared, the more this fateful spirit began to look an awful lot like an old man in a suit. "Maybe the whole 'skull head black robe' thing was a bit of an exaggeration," I thought to myself sluggishly. It was fitting, I supposed, that Death would be an old man. A grim reminder, perhaps, that even if we were able to survive the many slings and arrows of life, old age would claim us anyway. I began to yelp in protest, but my tongue was being uncooperative, so most of it was lost in translation. "I wohn go ow wiffow uh fiiiiight!" I declared. "Come - guh. Come see wuh ha'ens!"

"Sir, you have to move NOW!" 

"MAKE ME!" 

Even in my discombobulated state, I could tell that things were getting weird. Since when does Death argue with people? It seems like he would just swoop into the scene and scythe you into the afterlife; there isn't a whole lot of room for bargaining in that situation. Yet here I was, screaming and shouting like a drunkard and surprisingly not-dead. More confusingly, why did he call me sir? 

It was around this time that I realized that I may have misinterpreted the situation. My sight had cleared up enough for me to discern that this ghostly specter was not, in fact, a ghostly specter; rather, he was an old man with large coke bottle glasses, impeccably dressed in a classic black suit, with a ring of finely groomed silver hair like a crown around his bald scalp. He looked less like a spirit and more like a funeral director. His expression and body language could be accurately described as that of a man preparing to completely and utterly lose his shit. As I tried puzzling out why he seemed so angry with me, I noticed that there was a long line of cars behind him, reaching all the way up and beyond the top of the hill that had just claimed so much of my arm flesh. Why would there be so much traffic in the middle of a cemetery? I scanned the cars, looking for anything to indicate what was happening. I saw a red SUV, a couple of blue sedans, a black hearse, a beige two-door, a - wait.

Wait. Hang on. 

Long line of cars. Hearse. Middle of the cemetery. Cemetery. Hearse.

Oh. Oh shit. Oh NO. OH SHIT. OH HOLY HELL DON'T TELL ME I DID WHAT I THINK I JUST DID. 

I just wrecked my bike in front of a funeral procession.

AGH.

This next part requires a quick lesson in my own self-perception. 

I've often made references to the fact that I was an overweight adolescent, and the effects that it had on my self-esteem. I make it seem like I was a bumbling, idiotic doormat of a kid growing up, and in many ways I was. But, like a lot of children, I was also selfish and self-serving to the point of being a narcissist. This worship of the self would express itself in moments of extreme duress, when the protocols of civility and good behavior gave way before a mighty tempest of pubescent hormone-fueled rage. This awful encounter in the cemetery was one such moment. So as I was laying in the street, still in shock from my violent encounter with gravity, my arm in pulpy shreds, the sheer embarrassment I felt in the moment gave way to a powerful and primal sense of self-worth. While the upper layers of my consciousness had shriveled up in shame at my predicament, the baser layers rose up in protest. "How dare he," I thought. "Whoever's in that hearse is already dead, whereas I am currently dying. I am the priority here." This line of thought seemed perfectly reasonable, so I expressed it the best way I knew how - vulgarity. This is what I want you to keep in mind as you read these next words. 

"Sir, for the last time, get out of the street!" The old man yelled. "You are blocking the procession!"

"Nnnnnnyahfuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooouuuuu," I gurgled triumphantly. 

Oh dear.

What happened next was a small miracle. The friends I'd been riding my bike with were fairly passive for the whole encounter, standing on the sideline as I lost my mind in the middle of the road. My sudden outburst seemed to spur them into motion, and it is my belief that their interference was the only factor keeping the procession-leader-guy from finishing what the bike accident had started and tossing my body into the hearse with whatever dead asshole was ruining MY moment. They dragged me and my deformed bike out of the road and apologized to the man, said that I'd just been in a bike accident and we're so sorry, this was all a big misunderstanding. Their attempt at an explanation was somewhat derailed by my incessant need to moan "fuuuuuck yoooouuuu duuuude" as much as possible before he left to go put his stupid carcass in the ground. 

After the procession rolled by, my friends mustered their strength and proceeded to help their good buddy in need. By that, I of course mean that they took just enough time to verify that I wouldn't die, then they fucking left me in the middle of the goddamn cemetery with a pulverized arm and the sad remains of my destroyed bicycle. Assholes. 

Eventually, another friend of mine happened upon the disaster that was me while walking home. He helped me limp the rest of the way back home, at which point I had to break into my house through the God damn dog door because I forgot my house key that day. Have you ever tried to crawl through a medium size dog door with a fractured collarbone and a skinned arm? It's an ordeal. 

This story doesn't really have a good conclusion. When I went back to school, my arm was bound in a sling, and my attempts at concocting a cool backstory were quickly thwarted by my awful friends going on about the kid who was so fat that even his bike was known for eating the clothes off his body. The accident left me with a neat scar on my elbow and slightly limited mobility in my left shoulder. Here's a picture of my arm to close it out.