Get Off My Lawn #55 | Everyone's almost died right?
It’s back to adolescence for today’s podcast where I go over all the times I almost died in the 80s. It’s the same for everyone right? Didn’t we all almost drown that one time or we were standing too close to the edge of a building before a perceptive friend grabbed us and pulled us back to safety. I guess the ones who did fall off aren’t hear to read this. Being a teenager is real and it’s fun but it’s not real fun to constantly be kicking the grim reaper in the nuts and asking, “So, what are you going to do about it, wimp?” Thank God we all made it.
You know, you've had that time when uh you almost drowned or something or you're god I think of being a teenager and there were so many times that we were you know on some ledge on the top of a building going woo and then you realize you were falling and some guy named Andy grabbed you and you guys both went hoo but it was never like oh my god I almost died.
Thanks Andy.
It was always like oh dude You almost died That's not the proper reaction to almost dying when we get your chemo and we remove your left breast and the doctor says oh The cancer's gone for now you don't the doctor doesn't go oh dude You're lucky I cut your tit off.
You almost died dude You had stage four but it was all in your tit.
Oh man You're lucky I got that scalpel out at the 11th hour lady That would be really funny if there was a doctor who was like that I've heard of guys in the military like that that are so dumb and remember when I say dumb I'm not a smart snob.
I'm dumb about most stuff So I don't see dumb as an insult really But I met these these guys who are from Tennessee and they they were so dumb and they were introduced to me by the way by another military guy who was down there with them and he hung out with them See that's the thing about a lot of dumb guys It's not like we we don't hang out with dumb people.
That's why I hate the the word as an insult all the time.
You'll notice that with lefties on Twitter too.
It's always like oh my god this guy's so stupid.
You're an idiot like you can't be fat But you can bandy stupid around.
I don't know.
I don't like that Actually fat is mostly your fault stupid is just a genetic trait and I've heard this said of the bell curve that Herrnstein and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray didn't rewrite it to shock everyone and bring up race and make everyone poop their pants.
At least in Herrnstein's case, I'm not sure I'm saying his name right, Herrnstein.
His dad was a mechanic or something.
He was a blue-collar guy.
And he wanted to get back to his dad's mentality, which is smart.
What, you pencil in that geek?
Like, smart was just a trait.
It was like having long fingers or something.
It's not like everyone has to be smart.
Not everyone has to go to college.
That's such a gay rule.
It's like saying everyone has to ollie.
You know the skateboard trick?
You don't have to ollie.
It's a weird, hard thing to do that sort of defies physics.
If you're really good at skateboarding, by all means, go bananas, get sponsored, fucking catch some air, grind those trucks, fucking totally let out all the aggression, man.
What is that Suicidal Tendency song?
Beware, he spoke.
That's too skate.
And the skating's getting radical.
He's not Mexican, by the way, Mike Moir.
He's just like me.
I think he's Irish.
Any hazizle.
Yeah, they wanted to get back to just stupid.
Like, a lot of blue-collar dudes in Brooklyn, I know, are like that.
You know, where you say, hey, so what's going on here with your air conditioning?
Is it cheaper for you to do central air or just to have units in individual rooms?
I don't fuck no.
Ask my wife.
I'm stupid.
I don't handle that stuff.
She handles all that fucking electricity shit.
What's better?
I think that's a very healthy way to be.
Any who.
The any who's are the little sort of grappling hooks we use to get back to the original point.
It's sort of like you see those hooks that they would use on the docks during the Industrial Revolution.
So it sort of goes in between your finger.
It's got like a long cylindrical thing that you wrap your fingers around.
And then there's a long hook that comes out in between two fingers and you hook that back onto the original point.
And the original point is not lost despite, I think, four beers now.
The original point is that these dudes who were, these Tennessee dudes, these military guys who were in Somalia, they were so dumb, and now we're cool with dumb, that they didn't have PTSD.
And they were just like, god damn it, it was fucking crazy, y'all.
We go down there, we're in Somalia.
I forget what the name of Mogadishu or some shit.
These guys were shooting at us, fucking trying to kill us.
And we're in a tank, right?
So we're safe for the most part.
Then we find out they got RPJs.
Boom, boom.
So we just aimed our shit at them, shot at them, killed a bunch of guys, got the fuck out of there.
I had to go back the next day, of course.
That was intense.
And for them, it was just like a crazy video game.
They were the perfect soldiers in that sense.
But yeah, I've almost died a few times.
I feel like you have too, though, right?
Like car accidents.
Can you believe young people would play chicken?
What the fuck is that game?
We see how it looks okay in movies, right?
'cause it's like, it translates well to cinema,'cause it's It's perfect for movies and comic books.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Perspective, perspective, perspective.
P-O-V-P-O V, P-O-V.
But in real life, I don't understand.
We're either going to die or one of us is going to drive into a ditch and also maybe die.
I think we may have done that as kids.
I'm sort of reluctant to even admit it to myself because I don't want to know.
I think I've blocked it out.
I've blocked out a lot of things we used to do.
I remember in tree planting days, we'd be driving through the cutover on these piece of shit trucks, and I would stand on the hood of the truck.
We must have been going like 50 miles an hour.
And I would just sort of surf, standing on the hood of the truck, and going, going, Danger Bay, Danger Bay.
I think that was a TV show on at the time.
That could have been instant death.
Oh my god, I just remembered one.
We were in Costa Rica, and the area I was in was called Montezuma, Costa Rica.
I had a house there for many years, and the nickname of the town was Montefuma, Coca Rica, because there were lots of drugs.
And it was perfectly normal to do Coke all night and smoke a bunch of pot.
God, one time we got so baked that I was sitting there, and it was just one of the guys, the guy, the surfer dude, Jason, who I got out of jail.
That's another whole shitstorm of his story.
But he, I think I've done it as a podcast before.
Yeah, yeah, there is a Costa Rica podcast.
I'm sure of it.
So he left us this house he was staying in because he was so good at taking care of rich people's property, they'd often leave him their property to stay in.
So one time we were down there, and I can't remember why we didn't want to stay at our own place, probably because, actually, I have no fucking idea.
Maybe they had internet and TV, and that was rare at the time.
But we stayed at this awesome house.
It had a pool in it and everything.
And I was sitting there just doing rails and then fucking smoking.
That kind of, those levels of pot, you couldn't do it anymore.
It was too strong.
This is early 2000s when pot was, especially in Costa Rica, was still of this earth.
But you would smoke and smoke and smoke until you were just like a vegetable.
You can still talk.
But it was kind of like heroin.
I think you can, this is why I told the kids today not to do heroin.
You can get darn close, kiddies.
You can get real close, synthesizing it with pot and Xanax and booze and whatever.
So anyway, I remember saying to my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, oh man, so glad that bald guy left.
That was getting really, really uncomfortable.
Now we can fucking relax.
And she goes, there was never a bald person here.
We've been alone all evening.
There have been no guests tonight at this place that we're staying at.
You know, on that same trip, trip, that same stay, we were sitting in one of the bedrooms with a ceiling fan just watching TV.
And I didn't have a TV at my place.
It was the stupid, we bought it off this hippie who was involved with some fucking guru who would give all his money to the guru.
And he, you know, it was a beautiful place.
It was like mahogany and stuff.
And he carved it all himself.
But it was also solar.
And solar is the stupidest thing in the world.
You're constantly, it's like Scrooge is following you everywhere.
Like if you do the, if you use the washing machine in the day where you just used up your whole battery, you can't have lights on and listen to music that night.
Unless you buy batteries, then you can have music, but no lights.
And it's this constant, like, you know, change.
I almost said shekels.
Everyone is, I'm being watched like a hawk these days, and everything can be taken out of context.
But anywho, so it was kind of cool to be able to sit in a place and have TV and, you know, direct TV and we could watch movies.
And every time I travel, I kind of get homesick, especially when I would stay at the Crass Farm, these old anarchist punks in Essex.
After a few days there, I'm like, I want garbage.
I want a shitty TV show.
I want reality TV.
I want junk food because they're vegetarians and they're all very healthy.
And all their books are Kierkegaard and Smart.
And I want a celebrity magazine.
I want to see Kim Kardashian with an extra grande latte and Uggs.
I don't know why, but I miss garbage culture.
So it was nice to do that.
But anyway, there's a ceiling fan going and I just hear thump boo.
And the thumb was one of the blades hitting a bat.
And the was the bat flat out on the floor right by my foot.
Now, I'd never seen a bat just sitting there before.
I've seen them flying around the sky.
they're the most uncatchable things imaginable, right?
You'd have to be a fucking...
And I'm looking at this weird leathery rat with wings.
It's so fucking ugly.
Not in a disgusting way, like a blobfish, but it's just ugly in a cool way.
Like, you're ugly.
Fucking weird little face.
It's all crumpled up.
You look like a little scam artist, little hustler.
Hey, I got a plan.
Come here.
He's trying to rope you into some hustle where you get mugged or something.
He's Ratzo Rizzo.
And I don't know why, but all I could do was jump up on the bed.
Plus, we were probably baked.
And say, holy fucking shit, there's a bat right there.
Holy fucking shit.
There's a bat right there.
Holy fucking shit.
There's a bat right there.
Like, sort of, gala leo, gala leo, gala leo.
Like queen.
And eventually I, you know, when you see these animals, my old thing used to be just kill them.
They're dead, they're dying, they're having a horrible life.
But I've been talking to some experts and they've been chastising me for these murders because they say, no, fuckface, they're concussed.
You have to give them 10 minutes.
Their brains, like with birds, their brains swell so much when they hit the glass that they can't see and they go unconscious.
The swelling of the brain goes down.
They can see again, fumph, they're off.
And so I put a towel on the bat and kind of scooped him up.
And I brought him outside our little room and lay him there.
I don't know why.
I didn't want him to freak.
Oh, I know why, because I wanted when he got up to be able to fly and not get hit by a ceiling fan again.
And then he came to and little leather rat snuck off into the night.
God, they seem like an accident.
Well, I think all animals are accidents.
I think God came up with the magic goop 3.5 billion years ago, or however old the earth is.
And he goes, I'm trying to make some humans, but this shit is so magical that even if you get it on your fingers, then you'll make like a hammerhead shark.
And he made all these crazy, weird things, like the oarfish.
Go look up an oarfish.
It is clearly someone spilling the magic goop in the water and making a giant long snake with the peacock feathers sticking out of its head.
And bats are similar to that.
It's just they're a mess.
They're like a stupid rodent insect bird and running around trying to eat fruit flies at 100 miles an hour, up, down, right, left.
What a mess.
Probably the least elegant creature in the animal kingdom, right?
If you looked at the...
Even a kid scribbling, that would look nicer aesthetically than if you were to track the flight pattern of a bat.
It would just be...
Okay.
This is another time.
And I was partying with some locals, Ticos we call them, but local white people also.
And, God, they party down there.
Holy shit, the white people in Costa Rica who live there, the expats, they just like, a bump of Coke to them is just like a nespresso.
It's a little cappuccino.
You just sort of at lunch, you just.
And similarly, a shot.
Like, you'll be hard at work and not doing stupid stuff too, doing, you know, contracting and trying to tell people where to bring drywall and stuff like that and working with plumbers and all that.
But you'll just have a break, go over, maybe go home, grab a sandwich, do a line, and do a shot of tequila and then get back to work.
That's like bachelor party stuff.
But anyway, so I was hanging out with those dudes and I'm not great at that.
I'm not a beast.
So I was annihilated.
And it was probably five in the morning.
I think the sun was coming up.
And I go, fuck, dude, I got to get back to my house.
I got to pack my bags.
Then I got to get a taxi to Tamarindo to take the Sansa plane back to San Jose to get my flight.
I'm late.
And so I get on my ATV or whatever.
No, it was an ATV rental.
That was it.
And I'm on the ATV rental, going down these dirt roads, and the sun is just coming up.
And then, as all wasted people do, I started thinking, hey, while I'm here, I want to catch some air, man.
I am actually in a Mountain Dew commercial right now, so I might as well catch some mad air on these totally fucking dope boulders, dude.
Not boulders, but like, you know, the crappy Central American roads.
They make jumps by accident.
So I started doing some jumps, which I'm not good at.
And then someone turns out the lights.
And I wake up, I don't know how much longer.
I'm going to say 10 minutes.
And guess what I'm doing?
I'm having a nap and my blanket is an ATV.
I am underneath the ATV, but it is, I'm not, I don't have the hot engine on my back.
I have the seat and everything on my back.
The ATV is upside down with the wheels spinning and I'm somehow underneath it.
No idea how that happened.
Blood is pouring out of my elbow.
I still, when I touch it right now, I can feel the shattered bone.
I can feel the chunks floating around in there.
I gotta have that fix one day because sometimes I'll rest on it and it'll be like this searing sharp pain as this triangular jagged piece jabs into my nerves.
And I roll the ATV over and the handlebars are bent.
I managed to sort of bend them back to a reasonable look.
And I drive back, drive home, get my stuff, throw it all in a bag, drive back, return the rental.
He doesn't notice the bent handlebars.
It's funny because he told me off the record that he never rents to women because they always wreck them.
And he also said, the only exception I make, always like New York expats who run businesses down there, probably because if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.
And he goes, the only exception I have is lesbians.
I let lesbians rent them.
When there's a chick who wants to rent it, I always make up some fucking story because inevitably she hurts herself or she wrecks my ATV.
Plus, they're too hard on those, revving it and fucking up the clutch.
It's not worth it.
It ends up costing me money.
Meanwhile, I was just using it as a duvet.
So I get back.
And then the taxi driver doesn't want to let me in on the plane because he doesn't want his car full of blood.
So I take off, I kept a t-shirt in my bag and I bound it around my elbow like a turban and it just fills with blood.
Managed to make the flight.
Everything was fine.
But I clearly almost died there.
That could have been the end.
Is the big guy upstairs, does he pick and choose?
I've had some back and forth on this.
As a man that's new to religion, I still have a lot of questions.
And what's his name?
Ron Coleman Goldman?
The guy who, the First Amendment attorney who allowed that ban the slits.
No, the slants.
Allowed the slants to use their name.
Do you know the guy I'm talking about?
I'm kind of looking him up as I talk so I can get his name right.
Ron Coleman?
He's a great guy, Jewish guy.
Very religious, like Orthodox Jewish.
He's got the Yamaka and all that.
And his contention is, yes, God sweats the small stuff, which I have a lot of trouble with.
Ron Coleman, that's his name.
Like with the Mets.
Sometimes I feel very rude, bothering the Lord to say, I know that there's children starving in Africa and everything, but we have bases loaded right now.
We're in extra innings.
If Confordo could just really nail this into the rafters, I wouldn't bother you for the rest of the season, even.
I just don't want the Cubs to sweep us.
Do you think we could do that?
But I don't want to do that because, you know, I might have testicular cancer one day and he'll go, oh, what is this?
Another one of your fucking baseball games?
No, sir.
This is big.
These are actual balls that I own that are in my body.
I need these.
So I have trouble thinking that God is going to say, yeah, let's not kill him yet.
And then there's a guardian angel.
I don't know.
She made the ATV not smash my head against a boulder when it was going to.
She sort of put her hand there.
I don't know.
I mean, it's, of course, much more ethereal and harder to quantify than that.
These are amorphous floating concepts that are beyond our recognition.
I don't literally mean an angel hand.
But anyway, this is boring.
But I think back on all these times, and there's been a lot of them.
The worst one, the scariest one, and we all have the doozy, right?
It's usually water-related, I think.
But we used to go to this camp, not camp, we used to go to these beaches in Canada that was like the Jersey Shore, and it was called Sandbanks.
It still is.
And we were in high school.
We would just get a tent.
If we could, sometimes we just get nothing.
Billy Connolly talks about this in early Glasgow, so it must be a genetic trait with Scots, but we'd go camping sometimes with nothing but pants.
You know what I mean?
And just get tons of beer and make a fire, and you just fall asleep where you fall asleep, and you hope that you don't get eaten to death by bugs.
Sandbanks wasn't bad with bugs.
I don't know why.
Maybe there's a lot of birds there or something.
So we would camp and get wasted and eat like beans with our hands and stuff, you know, like animals, Lord of the Flies, alcoholics.
I remember one time we would piss on each other.
Did you do this in high school?
You go up to a guy, you have your dick out, and you start peeing on his leg, but you talk to him really serious.
Like, okay, here's what I just realized, guys.
We're going to run out of gas on the way back.
And he goes, wait, what?
That's terrible.
We better get some gas.
So you get his eyes up here, like high up.
I think there's not enough gas stations in the area, and we don't have...
Now, the amazing thing about pee is it's body temperature.
So the other guy doesn't feel it on his leg.
It's just warmth.
And then eventually he notices that you're cracking up and he goes, what's so funny about gas?
Oh, you fucking bastard.
And beats you up.
And you laugh as fists are pounding into your chest and head and arms.
That's good training, right, for fighting?
Funny punches?
Laughing punches.
That's the real challenge with boxing.
It's not punching.
It's getting punched.
And it's not getting punched until you get up when you can.
No, no, no, fuck off.
My biggest problem with boxing is the natural indignation I feel when I'm punched.
I want to stop and talk about it and have a break and analyze it.
The hardest part I find with fighting is getting punched in the face and just moving right on like someone farted.
It's not a queef.
A queef, I can just plow through.
It could be the loudest queef on earth.
It could be like, and I swear to God, I wouldn't even flinch.
I don't break for queefs, but I do break for being punched in the fucking head.
This is turning into a pretty raunchy one.
I didn't mean it to be.
So we rented jet skis, and this must have been 1986.
We were 16.
And jet skis weren't common.
It was like a crazy thing.
It was sort of the modern equivalent of, you know, those things you stand on and you can fly like you're in the Avengers, and the water shoots out from where your feet are, and you're a magic floating guy.
You know, they were in Kenny Powers and stuff.
It was kind of that status.
Like, there's a crazy new thing.
It's an ocean motorcycle.
That's how old I am.
So we're zipping around on these things, and it's super fun.
You got to get the ones, though, where you don't have to hold up the handlebars.
Because those, you're just at the gym, basically, and you get exhausted.
You want to make sure that it's stationary.
And that's like the difference between a sea dew and a jet ski.
I don't know all the semantics, but just make sure you do that when you rent them.
And I just had a weird memory.
I remember renting one in Jamaica with my wife.
And as we were whipping by, I saw a sea turtle about four feet below.
And I thought, I'm going to jump off right now.
She'll be stuck on the back, just floating.
And I'm going to leap into the water and grab the sea turtle by the sides of its shell and then lift it up out of the water and show her this sea turtle that I just seamlessly captured like some sort of beautiful swan.
And then we just kept driving.
I didn't do that.
You know those things where you go, I'm going to do something so intense right now.
And then as you're lost, thinking about how cool it's going to be, the moment has passed and you're now miles from a sea turtle.
Anyway, so this is 16 years old going on.
And these things are designed when you fall off, they just veer to the left.
So you can jump off and it'll do a huge circle and come run and pick you up.
Just like, I don't know, I was going to say like a motorbike, but that's not true.
Or it's not true of an ATV.
It's probably true of some sort of like bumper cars.
There's probably another vehicle that does this.
It's a smart thing to do.
So anyway, I'm on it, me, and the guys are kind of far away from me.
I sort of went off on my own little area.
And I can't remember how I fell off.
Maybe I jumped off.
I can't remember how I fell off.
But it does the thing where it veers left.
Now, this is Canada.
So it's a beautiful summer's day and everything, but it's still rugged terrain.
So the wind is really blowing on the lake and it's pushing the waves.
The waves are like, you could almost surf them.
So as this thing goes left, it doesn't, it sort of starts hitting the waves and the waves go, no, not on my watch.
And it pushes it back to the right.
And then it arcs around again.
So instead of doing circles, it's doing these sort of zigzags, these concentric zigzags farther away from me.
So I go, no problem, I'll just, I'm a strong swimmer.
So I start swimming at it, swimming at it, swimming at it.
And then I realize, you know what?
It's this darn life jacket that's slowing me down.
If I can get that off, I could really just zip to it.
So I take it off, like all wise 16-year-olds do.
Remember, when you're a teenager, your frontal lobe is not developed.
So you don't have a finished brain.
Your brain is incomplete.
You don't have a brain 2.0.
You have the first draft.
So I'm swimming like a maniac, and it's just at my fingertips almost, but the waves are pushing it away.
And then it starts going farther and farther away.
And then I realize, oh shit, I don't have it.
But I spent all my chips swimming like a maniac to get to that jet ski.
And I'm not scared yet, but I'm getting there because the inevitable mathematics of it all starts seeping in.
And you go, I have X amount of breath left in me.
These guys are X amount away.
The jet ski is never coming back.
That ship has sailed.
So it's a matter of treading water until someone notices me.
So I start getting scared and I start going, help!
But it's loud and noisy and those guys are having fun and it's windy and there's no way in hell.
The jet skis are the loudest things on earth.
They don't hear help, help.
So I'm, you know, hundreds of feet away, dozens of meters, and I come with another stupid idea.
What I'll do is I'll swim, I'll stay up, I'll scream, help, help, at the top of my lungs.
And remember, I gave 110% to catching that jet ski.
So now my arms feel like spaghetti.
And I go, I know, I'll just go underwater, hold my breath, and let my arms rest because they're going numb.
They hurt so much.
You know, like if you're at the gym and then you have to do 20 push-ups and towards the end there, you're just like, these arms aren't connected to me.
It's like each arm is a Coke dick.
I'm totally impotent.
So I went underwater and I started freaking out.
And sorry, I went underwater and that doesn't help.
It's not like you have a nice break.
What are you going to do?
Go down there, read a magazine?
What do you SpongeBob SquarePants?
Go hang out with that squirrel in her little air balloon?
I'm getting mad at my 16-year-old self.
This was 30 years ago, by the way, folks.
And so I come up again, help, help.
Now, what I think you should do is you can tread water pretty evenly if you're calm.
Don't bother screaming and just do sort of wide, you know, 90-degree swoops with your arms and kick as much as you can, you know, normal amounts just to keep your head up.
And you can be pretty good for a long time.
Now, the wind was pushing these waves over my face and stuff, but my problem was screaming my head off and flailing around like an idiotic teenager in a mosh pit.
And that was, you know, just draining my energy.
It was like naked and afraid day 18.
And then I realized I'm going to die.
And I start just relaxing into the lake seems so appealing, just giving up, sort of like what junkies must go through when that little heroin resputin is on their shoulder, like with dashed snow.
Just saying, do it, man, just fuck it, just do it.
Why are we fighting it?
Don't fight it anymore.
And I'll never forget this till the day I die.
I saw my parents reading the newspaper and it said, Ontario boy dies at jet ski accident in Sandbanks, Ontario.
It would have like a little, you know, yearbook picture or something like that.
And the thought of them seeing that was just so depressing and sad.
And I started fighting more and more and I started doing bigger circles, training my energy more.
Now I'm really screaming help like I'm in Pentera.
Like it's our number one hit and we just came on for the Encore.
And I'm thrashing back and forth.
I don't want to fucking die.
Refusing to die.
I don't know if that was, if the determination is what saved it or if I had any say in how long I stayed up there, but thank the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul Toddy, T-O-T-T-I, noticed me at that point.
He saw my sad little jet ski heading towards the weeds without a person on it.
He came by and picked me up.
And I had my parents mourning my death.
I had been to hell and back.
I had seen the other side.
I couldn't use my arms anymore.
I was coughing.
Like I was almost dead.
But Paul was still in party mode.
So he's like, what's going on, dude?
Oh, fuck, check out McKinnon.
Hey, fucking coughing out water like a fucking pussy.
What's going on there?
And I'm like, I almost died.
And so he throws me on the back.
He takes me to my jet ski.
I get on it.
And then we try back.
And I just bawl out the renter.
And typical Canadian mentality, typical hoes are just like, I almost fucking died.
I want my money back.
And he's like, you're not getting your fucking money back, eh?
You knew what you were getting into.
There was no waivers or anything.
This is 1986.
And I screamed at him.
Then I started screaming at all the other people who were lining up.
These things, they don't work.
They don't come back to you.
I almost drowned out there.
Meanwhile, I'm the idiot who took off my life jacket.
He's right not to give me my money back.
And for, you know, for many years, I sort of thought, I almost died.
That's scary shit.
And that's why whenever you hear about some dumb teenager that was on a rock somewhere and fell, or Nick Cave, his son was on acid and thought he could fly, apparently jumped off a cliff.
I don't go, fucking dummy, stupid teenagers.
I go there, but for the grace of God, goes I. We could easily become those guys.
And I have a million of those stories.
That's this other scary part.
Like this dude, Dan Austin, he was this cool rockabilly at the Earl of March.
And I don't think he liked the G-Dog very much.
I was an acquired taste to many people.
And though we had sort of created our own subculture with punks and mods at our school, our school, a lot of my friends had British parents, so we were really into British subcultures and British music and stuff.
Punk, I've noticed, didn't really take in sort of suburban New York.
You meet these people here and they were never into punk.
But in Canada, especially Ottawa, where they had all these British immigrants, everyone was a punk or a mod at some point.
Or at least into like New Wave or something.
Anyway, we had sort of made our little group over here that wasn't part of the cool hierarchy, but there was, of course, lots of crossover.
And the very, very cool alternative people didn't think I was worthy.
I have no idea why.
They were clearly wrong.
But Those are the kind of people, too, that would be sort of not, they wouldn't hate the Nazi skinhead dudes.
They'd sort of still talk to them once in a while.
It was a weird 80s thing that's hard to explain to people, but we had this Nazi skinhead named Pat at our school that was my archenemy.
He tried to kill me.
No, he didn't try to kill me, but he made it clear that he would.
And the cool crowd sort of liked him.
I don't know.
It's hard to explain why.
It was just sort of seen as very dangerous and gauche, like sexy back then.
And it was almost like being in the Hell's Angels.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
It was like being a biker.
So it was dangerous and wrong, but it wasn't seen as evil.
And they beat up wimpy punk guys like me.
So that was even better for their cachet.
Anyway, Dan was sort of part of the cool crowd of the alt crowd.
And probably still is.
Fuck.
He's probably a cool dad.
But, you know, I always did well with ladies.
So we'd have this crossover where I would know like his ex-girlfriend or this female friend or a girl he's working on, I'd also be working on.
And that would bring us, you know, that would cross our paths.
And I think that made them resent me more.
Like, why the fuck is he getting in fucking Nicole Jarvis?
So I'm kind of, and I was always oblivious to people's opinions of me.
So, boy, I really talk about myself a lot on this fucking podcast, don't I?
So I see Dan on the street, and he had a mini.
For some reason, a lot of people, and there were carpies, they lived in this rural area near Kanata called Carp.
So they'd have to do a lot of commuting to get to any kind of civilization from the farmland.
And their weapon of choice was minis, Austin minis, that they would buy, used, and destroyed and fix them up.
So they'd be souped up.
And it's a bizarre thing now that I think about it, at least, these like rock pilly farmers' kids in minis.
You don't see that anywhere else.
It's just a weird, perfect storm of criteria.
So he's in town in his mini, and maybe I'm talking to the girl in the back seat, and where are you guys headed, blah, blah, blah.
And then I'm sort of sitting with my ass cheeks, my gorgeous little perky ass, 16-year-old ass.
All these, by the way, almost deaths happen around 16, 17.
So I'm sort of, it's hard to explain, but I was putting my butt cheeks onto his window with the window up mostly.
So somehow on that like quarter inch that sticks out, I managed to sort of perch my body on it.
So I wasn't sitting on anything.
I was like, Spider-Man, I might as well be sitting on the side of your house.
Not on a window ledge, per se, just on like a brick that's sort of sticking out.
So I did not have a very good butt grip.
And we're talking, blah, blah, blah.
And then he goes, all right, I'm headed out.
So he starts driving, and I didn't jump off.
And so he starts going, and he's going faster and faster.
And then it gets into the scary zone, which is anything over 40.
And let's say we're going 45 at this point, and I realize, okay, this is fucking dangerous.
I know what I'll do.
I'll propel myself so hard off of his car that I will clear the road and I'll land on the suburban grass and then just roll 300 times and I'll be safe and it'll be cool.
That's the way your mind thinks.
You think you can jump over cars and stuff.
And you know what?
At 17, sometimes you can't.
So I push using my butt cheeks and my hands and one of my legs and I jump off of this car at 45 miles an hour, sort of, you know, west as it goes north.
And I realize in midair, we don't have clearance.
Houston, we have a problem.
So I think, no problem.
I'll just put my foot down on the pavement and that'll just give me that extra trajectory and I'll land on the grass and roll 300 times.
But when you're moving 45 miles an hour with the road, to put your foot on the ground doesn't help you bounce over.
What it does is something I didn't expect.
The millisecond my foot touched the road, it kicked me in the head.
Now, if you want to know, if you want to try this at home, take a Grover puppet and put a hockey puck on its foot and then lean it out the window of a moving car and just slowly lower the Grover puppet to the ground until the hockey puck touches the ground at 45 miles an hour.
And you will see the hockey puck whip up and smash Grover in the head.
And then what happens is Grover's face slams onto the pavement, smashing his head, cutting his head open.
And then instead of doing his 300 rolls on the grass, as was planned, the 300 rolls happened on the pavement.
And he's off, by the way.
He drives.
And I remember I got up.
I wasn't knocked unconscious for some reason.
And I was bleeding like crazy, as heads do.
And I just remember my heart pounding and going, holy fucking shit.
I almost fucking died.
Just like the holy fucking shit, there's a bat right there, I realize.
No, maybe it was more like, holy fucking shit, holy fucking shit.
Yeah, I think it was more like that.
Sorry, the bat was confusing me.
But it was more like, holy fucking shit, holy fucking shit.
Holy fuck.
Like, I was in shock.
That's what was really going on.
I was in a state of shock.
And we used to hang out on top of a school, not our school for some reason.
We used to hang out at it.
Oh, because our school was too big.
It was too tall.
But there was a school for handicapped kids, retards.
No, sorry, I don't like to use the word retards for actual retards.
A school for handicapped kids.
It was only about three floors.
And they had this sort of ladder that went up the side of it that was encased in sort of a, you know, steel gate so you couldn't fall and die.
Or at least if you did, you'd sort of go bump, dump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, all the way down.
And we would go up that ladder and hang out on the roof and smoke cigarettes and do bottle toques with hash and, you know, teenager stuff.
So I know the guys are there.
And I run and I run for maybe a quarter mile just saying, holy fucking shit, holy fucking shit, bleeding all over myself.
And I make it to the ladder and I start going up the ladder and I'm like, guys, guys, guys, as I go up the ladder, and they're waiting for me at the top.
They wait until I get about 68% of the way up.
And two of them start pissing on me.
That's the kind of hijinks we got up to as kids.
So they're laughing their heads off, pissing down this cage all over me.
And the beauty of their timing was, it was like right out of the military.
68%, if I go back down now, they're going to empty their bladders.
My only hope is to go the remaining, what is it, 32% and start pounding them.
But I'm also in shock and bleeding to death.
I mean, I still have scars on my hairline from this.
And so I'm going out and I'm going, guys, this isn't fucking funny.
I almost died.
I almost fucking died.
I'm recording this podcast at home late at night, so I can't do the screaming, but I was screaming Pantera style, drowning jet ski levels, help.
And they finally get up, and I have, their P probably sanitized my wounds.
They actually did the perfect thing they could do because it's ammonia and it's a very strong kind of a bleach setup.
So their P washed out my wounds, got the gravel out, got the dirt out and coterized it with the ammonia acid.
And I got up there and I've just, I'm got pee all over my hair and blood and I'm just fucking punching, punching, pounding those guys as they laugh their head off, laughed their heads off doing the pee laugh that we used to do in sandbags.
