I can't say I had quite the dramatic experience growing up that you had. However, I can say our paths are somewhat similar. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania and moved to Seattle in the early 90's. Which in this part of the country was toward the end of the "Grunge" era. I was all into Pearl Jam at the time and had my mind blown by that performance with Neil Young. Honestly, it still melts my face to watch that performance.
I also had a skinny girlfriend back then (does having sex with a girl for three months count as a girlfriend?) who would physically abuse me....I found out later that she was a meth addict. Hey, I was in my early 20's and was pretty wet behind the ears.
Either way, that Super Bowl fucking sucked. Fuck Neil O'Donnell.
I had so, so many of your cultural touchstones, we must have passed each other in the night a dozen times decades ago.
Near-death experiences...
My father once came into the room, drunk, saw my mother crying, and started beating me. Hard. I knew it was different than usual when I curled up on the kitchen floor and it didn't stop- gestures of submission usually did it. A few minutes in, I felt my bladder and bowels go. It was an out-of-body experience and I wondered if I was paralyzed because there was no sensation behind it. I became aware I was losing consciousness- I was only actually out for a few seconds- but having never had fully lost consciousness for any reason before, I thought for certain I was about to die, or at least never wake up.
My nerdy friend Ken and I went trick or treating in middle school and had a gun pointed at us because a guy demanded he hand over his Friday the 13th costume hockey mask. His friends grabbed us and threw us against a car and starting taking everything we had on us. My friend Ken got scared enough to start crying and just began pleading "help me help me help me" to me from the other side of the car, so I turned around and shoved my boob into the guy's gun and repeated "shoot me shoot me shoot me" until they left.
In high school, I had enough one day and decided to commit hara-kiri because I thought it was a beautiful notion. After taking an hour of slowly shoving a thin knife into my abdomen like stepping into cold water, I sat there thinking about following through when my friend called and started leaving me a message on my translucent purple plastic phone. I heard one of my parents coming towards my room to see why I didn't answer and got up, with the knife under my shirt, and answered the phone to tell my friend that yes, I would be in school tomorrow and she could pay me back the money she owed me. It felt monumentally stupid at that point so I snuck into the bathroom, pulled the blade the rest of the way out, and butterfly-bandaged it. Years later when I pierced my navel, the scar was covered up and eventually more or less vanished.
In Japan, I suddenly started having what I thought was a heart attack. My face and left side went numb, my heart was pounding, and I couldn't stay on my feet without getting dizzy. After rehearsing my explanation on Google Translate, I called 110 and succinctly explained what was happening. By the time the paramedics showed up, I was having these little blackouts and tunnel vision, which was a new experience for me. On the ambulance ride, they frankly kept telling me they were worried about my heartbeat, and one tried to calm me down by joking about his daughter being my student and a pain in the ass.
I got hooked into some monitor at like 3am, and after a half hour in the hospital, everything just calmed down and stopped suddenly. I was exhausted and my chest hurt like I had been kicked, but I was fine. One of the doctors spoke perfect English and talked through all the scans with me. They said they had absolutely no idea what happened. I've never experienced anything like it or since.
I did basically no drugs, in comparison to your experience. I had a good number of friends die to heroin and knew friends in school with addict parents who were such a train wreck that I was scared completely straightedge until I was in the club scene long enough to at least appreciate alcohol.
I was so depressed and messed up and was anorexic going into early adulthood; that there was a general consensus I would probably not get past 25, which I guess was a cliche of the 90s for some people.
I think about death a lot. Not suicide, never again, but I think about it often. I'm usually frozen at this perfect equidistance between existential horror and defiant laughter at it.
I did not spend a single moment of the last 3 years worried I was going to die. I felt weirdly more immune to it than I would the rest of the time because I was so oddly disgusted by the degree of hysterical fear around me that I almost overcompensated to a point of anger-fueled bravery.
I do not generally feel fragile. I feel powerless, small, and insignificant, but I have proven hard to kill and possessed of a strong desire to live, despite myself. I am frequently not happy about being alive, but I always recognize it as something that will pass, sooner or later.
I would not agree we are living in the best time to be alive, at all. Certainly not the worst in the great sweep of history, but not the best. I will take it over the alternative.
i nearly died today, worst rain ive even driven in, vision down to about 30 feet but still hauling at 70mph, aquaplaned for a bit, youre never more alive!
i did have an out of body experience when i was 9, so ive not been scared of death since. it was just my discovery of being asthmatic, waiting for the doctor to arrive and floating away looking down at the doc and my mother as they tended to me, no emotion just the thought oh thats me. ive since cured the asthma, pity it took me 31 years to figure it out, even bigger pity doctors dont know its mostly curable
Not quite as entertaining as yours, but an overdose when I was about 17, woke up in hospital with my parents staring at me.......
Car crash in my 20's, where I headbutted a lorry on the motorway and have a dent in my skull where they rebuilt my eye socket.
After Gulf war 1 in Iraq, we strolled into an area with loads of golf balls....... AKA AP mines.
Married to a fun loving psycho who tried to hire somebody to kill me, got into a fight with some aggressive arsehole and they also tried to hire someone to kill us both.
Recently got thrown off the top of a ladder by a core drill knocking me out when the clutch jammed and breaking my front teeth.
My comment would be way too long. But I thank God that I'm still alive after my 20's. Eeeeks! One of my scariest memories was buying crack off the street by myself in a really bad area of the city I lived in at the time. The next thing I knew I had a car full of armed people I didn't know parked at a 7-11 and the seats were all being ripped out of my car (literally) because someone thought they dropped a rock. (If anyone has ever done crack, once you have smoked it all up, anything white you see anywhere looks like crack... it's a HORRIBLE drug). Not to mention the huge hit I took that night that made me think I was going to die. That incident, along with numerous others definitely makes me grateful to God that I have been able to still live a healthy, long, productive and joyful life.
If we really want to, no matter how bad we think we have it, if we look across the street we can often find someone much worse off than we are.
Was in a rollover in a VW Baja bug in AZ when I was 18. My friend flew out after a couple rolls (she was driving). I ended up in backseat and had to crawl through broken back window over the engine to get out. Rolled 5 times. The roof was a foot above where I sat. Lucky I didn't have seatbelt on. Not a scratch on me.
heh, we must be about the same age; wasn't a huge fan of the song when it was everywhere all the time, but your post made this song pop in to my head -
As for harrowing experiences, New Year's 1992 stands out.
Note: late 1980s, early 1990s I was wasted so while I'm certain about events actually happening and quite sure how they happened (witnesses, reports, friends being there, scars and so on) I have trouble placing a specific event in a specific year. So let's just call it 1992, +/- 2 years.
Me and my girlfriend-at-the-time and her cousin was up on a small plaza overlooking Stockholm from the its southside, on top of a cliff where you can see most of the inner city. So were at least 500 others. Now, that little plaza is walled off on its south side, and the north side is a solid 90+ yard drop onto asphalt, boats and the ice in Riddarfjärden (riddar(e) means knight). Also, in the wall on the plaza's south side is a cast iron gate, wide enough for one linebacker to pass through at a time, sans shoulderguards.
All good, people are jolly despite the cold.
And then a bunch of [lots of slurs about their non-skiing ancestry] thugs starts firing off fireworks into the crowd. Heavy duty roman candle-style fireworks, and the [expletives] are aiming them into the crowd at face height, cackling and dancing with delight when the crowd starts panicking.
500 people trying to squeeze out that gate all at once. My girlfriend's cousin and me made for the corner between the wall and a house it was built up to, grabbing hold of the drainpipe and keeping my girlfriend innermost in the corner, while throwing elbows at anyone coming to close.
After about forever, enough police arrived with firemen carrying hydraulic cutters for the gate and the pressure eased off.
Next day (read: in the afternoon) looking in the mirror in my bathroom I realise I don't have any hair on the back of my head, it's been torn out. My elbows are a deep purple, and I have two black eyes. Knuckles are caked with blood and open sores and I can't remember throwing a single punch - and to add insult to injury my Killer-style DMs were busted and my Bomber-jacket was ripped.
Found my way here via the Gutter, so props (is that the right term? Thought it meant theatrical materials?) to you both for that.
Amazing stories, in the post and comments. I survived many such scrapes and finally compiled 66 episodes into book form, Brushes with Death (along with a smaller portion of Brushes with Fame). Though you suggest life-changing revelations, I seemed to take them in stride. But I guess the outcome is revealed when my friend asks my predictions about something (e.g., the future of Twitter, LOL), and I realize, "I don't think much about the future; focused more on the present." :)
I had the pleasure of seeing Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins and RHCP October 31, 1991, in Toronto. Fantastic show! I never experimented with drugs much, but I did have a friend on way too many shrooms roll out of my car at 40 mph because he was sure we were going to kill him.
What an awesome post. I'm 52 and remember many of the same things with similar fondness. I had emergency surgery at 34 when my small intestine tied itself in a knot: I had to have 3.5 feet of it removed. A few years later, I went into a fishtail and rolled a Ford Escape, but escaped with no injuries. We're all on borrowed time, but not all of us realize it. Brilliant post!
I can't say I had quite the dramatic experience growing up that you had. However, I can say our paths are somewhat similar. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania and moved to Seattle in the early 90's. Which in this part of the country was toward the end of the "Grunge" era. I was all into Pearl Jam at the time and had my mind blown by that performance with Neil Young. Honestly, it still melts my face to watch that performance.
I also had a skinny girlfriend back then (does having sex with a girl for three months count as a girlfriend?) who would physically abuse me....I found out later that she was a meth addict. Hey, I was in my early 20's and was pretty wet behind the ears.
Either way, that Super Bowl fucking sucked. Fuck Neil O'Donnell.
Life is easier now and we're spoiled. FACTS!
I had so, so many of your cultural touchstones, we must have passed each other in the night a dozen times decades ago.
Near-death experiences...
My father once came into the room, drunk, saw my mother crying, and started beating me. Hard. I knew it was different than usual when I curled up on the kitchen floor and it didn't stop- gestures of submission usually did it. A few minutes in, I felt my bladder and bowels go. It was an out-of-body experience and I wondered if I was paralyzed because there was no sensation behind it. I became aware I was losing consciousness- I was only actually out for a few seconds- but having never had fully lost consciousness for any reason before, I thought for certain I was about to die, or at least never wake up.
My nerdy friend Ken and I went trick or treating in middle school and had a gun pointed at us because a guy demanded he hand over his Friday the 13th costume hockey mask. His friends grabbed us and threw us against a car and starting taking everything we had on us. My friend Ken got scared enough to start crying and just began pleading "help me help me help me" to me from the other side of the car, so I turned around and shoved my boob into the guy's gun and repeated "shoot me shoot me shoot me" until they left.
In high school, I had enough one day and decided to commit hara-kiri because I thought it was a beautiful notion. After taking an hour of slowly shoving a thin knife into my abdomen like stepping into cold water, I sat there thinking about following through when my friend called and started leaving me a message on my translucent purple plastic phone. I heard one of my parents coming towards my room to see why I didn't answer and got up, with the knife under my shirt, and answered the phone to tell my friend that yes, I would be in school tomorrow and she could pay me back the money she owed me. It felt monumentally stupid at that point so I snuck into the bathroom, pulled the blade the rest of the way out, and butterfly-bandaged it. Years later when I pierced my navel, the scar was covered up and eventually more or less vanished.
In Japan, I suddenly started having what I thought was a heart attack. My face and left side went numb, my heart was pounding, and I couldn't stay on my feet without getting dizzy. After rehearsing my explanation on Google Translate, I called 110 and succinctly explained what was happening. By the time the paramedics showed up, I was having these little blackouts and tunnel vision, which was a new experience for me. On the ambulance ride, they frankly kept telling me they were worried about my heartbeat, and one tried to calm me down by joking about his daughter being my student and a pain in the ass.
I got hooked into some monitor at like 3am, and after a half hour in the hospital, everything just calmed down and stopped suddenly. I was exhausted and my chest hurt like I had been kicked, but I was fine. One of the doctors spoke perfect English and talked through all the scans with me. They said they had absolutely no idea what happened. I've never experienced anything like it or since.
I did basically no drugs, in comparison to your experience. I had a good number of friends die to heroin and knew friends in school with addict parents who were such a train wreck that I was scared completely straightedge until I was in the club scene long enough to at least appreciate alcohol.
I was so depressed and messed up and was anorexic going into early adulthood; that there was a general consensus I would probably not get past 25, which I guess was a cliche of the 90s for some people.
I think about death a lot. Not suicide, never again, but I think about it often. I'm usually frozen at this perfect equidistance between existential horror and defiant laughter at it.
I did not spend a single moment of the last 3 years worried I was going to die. I felt weirdly more immune to it than I would the rest of the time because I was so oddly disgusted by the degree of hysterical fear around me that I almost overcompensated to a point of anger-fueled bravery.
I do not generally feel fragile. I feel powerless, small, and insignificant, but I have proven hard to kill and possessed of a strong desire to live, despite myself. I am frequently not happy about being alive, but I always recognize it as something that will pass, sooner or later.
I would not agree we are living in the best time to be alive, at all. Certainly not the worst in the great sweep of history, but not the best. I will take it over the alternative.
i nearly died today, worst rain ive even driven in, vision down to about 30 feet but still hauling at 70mph, aquaplaned for a bit, youre never more alive!
i did have an out of body experience when i was 9, so ive not been scared of death since. it was just my discovery of being asthmatic, waiting for the doctor to arrive and floating away looking down at the doc and my mother as they tended to me, no emotion just the thought oh thats me. ive since cured the asthma, pity it took me 31 years to figure it out, even bigger pity doctors dont know its mostly curable
Let's just say that once you've expected to be dead, and weren't, you're not likely to fear the possibility of death ever again.
Dude! I miss the 90's💞..I keep thinking it was 20 years ago lol
Not quite as entertaining as yours, but an overdose when I was about 17, woke up in hospital with my parents staring at me.......
Car crash in my 20's, where I headbutted a lorry on the motorway and have a dent in my skull where they rebuilt my eye socket.
After Gulf war 1 in Iraq, we strolled into an area with loads of golf balls....... AKA AP mines.
Married to a fun loving psycho who tried to hire somebody to kill me, got into a fight with some aggressive arsehole and they also tried to hire someone to kill us both.
Recently got thrown off the top of a ladder by a core drill knocking me out when the clutch jammed and breaking my front teeth.
Normal stuff really.
My comment would be way too long. But I thank God that I'm still alive after my 20's. Eeeeks! One of my scariest memories was buying crack off the street by myself in a really bad area of the city I lived in at the time. The next thing I knew I had a car full of armed people I didn't know parked at a 7-11 and the seats were all being ripped out of my car (literally) because someone thought they dropped a rock. (If anyone has ever done crack, once you have smoked it all up, anything white you see anywhere looks like crack... it's a HORRIBLE drug). Not to mention the huge hit I took that night that made me think I was going to die. That incident, along with numerous others definitely makes me grateful to God that I have been able to still live a healthy, long, productive and joyful life.
If we really want to, no matter how bad we think we have it, if we look across the street we can often find someone much worse off than we are.
Great article! Even though we are doom and gloomy here, it's important to remember we live in the best time ever to be alive!
Was in a rollover in a VW Baja bug in AZ when I was 18. My friend flew out after a couple rolls (she was driving). I ended up in backseat and had to crawl through broken back window over the engine to get out. Rolled 5 times. The roof was a foot above where I sat. Lucky I didn't have seatbelt on. Not a scratch on me.
heh, we must be about the same age; wasn't a huge fan of the song when it was everywhere all the time, but your post made this song pop in to my head -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo
Yeah, there is no other place I'd rather be....
Also, You Have Died of Dysentery
As for harrowing experiences, New Year's 1992 stands out.
Note: late 1980s, early 1990s I was wasted so while I'm certain about events actually happening and quite sure how they happened (witnesses, reports, friends being there, scars and so on) I have trouble placing a specific event in a specific year. So let's just call it 1992, +/- 2 years.
Me and my girlfriend-at-the-time and her cousin was up on a small plaza overlooking Stockholm from the its southside, on top of a cliff where you can see most of the inner city. So were at least 500 others. Now, that little plaza is walled off on its south side, and the north side is a solid 90+ yard drop onto asphalt, boats and the ice in Riddarfjärden (riddar(e) means knight). Also, in the wall on the plaza's south side is a cast iron gate, wide enough for one linebacker to pass through at a time, sans shoulderguards.
All good, people are jolly despite the cold.
And then a bunch of [lots of slurs about their non-skiing ancestry] thugs starts firing off fireworks into the crowd. Heavy duty roman candle-style fireworks, and the [expletives] are aiming them into the crowd at face height, cackling and dancing with delight when the crowd starts panicking.
500 people trying to squeeze out that gate all at once. My girlfriend's cousin and me made for the corner between the wall and a house it was built up to, grabbing hold of the drainpipe and keeping my girlfriend innermost in the corner, while throwing elbows at anyone coming to close.
After about forever, enough police arrived with firemen carrying hydraulic cutters for the gate and the pressure eased off.
Next day (read: in the afternoon) looking in the mirror in my bathroom I realise I don't have any hair on the back of my head, it's been torn out. My elbows are a deep purple, and I have two black eyes. Knuckles are caked with blood and open sores and I can't remember throwing a single punch - and to add insult to injury my Killer-style DMs were busted and my Bomber-jacket was ripped.
Found my way here via the Gutter, so props (is that the right term? Thought it meant theatrical materials?) to you both for that.
Edited because I can't spell for shite somedays.
Amazing stories, in the post and comments. I survived many such scrapes and finally compiled 66 episodes into book form, Brushes with Death (along with a smaller portion of Brushes with Fame). Though you suggest life-changing revelations, I seemed to take them in stride. But I guess the outcome is revealed when my friend asks my predictions about something (e.g., the future of Twitter, LOL), and I realize, "I don't think much about the future; focused more on the present." :)
I had the pleasure of seeing Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins and RHCP October 31, 1991, in Toronto. Fantastic show! I never experimented with drugs much, but I did have a friend on way too many shrooms roll out of my car at 40 mph because he was sure we were going to kill him.
What an awesome post. I'm 52 and remember many of the same things with similar fondness. I had emergency surgery at 34 when my small intestine tied itself in a knot: I had to have 3.5 feet of it removed. A few years later, I went into a fishtail and rolled a Ford Escape, but escaped with no injuries. We're all on borrowed time, but not all of us realize it. Brilliant post!