(September 24, 2015 at 7:10 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(September 24, 2015 at 5:54 pm)Mermaid Wrote: Congratulations! You sound really excited. And congrats on not shooting blanks!
Testicular cancer, incarceration, what else have you survived? Sheesh!
Was that rhetorical? If not, click on.
Let's see if I can hit a few of the highlights:
I grew up on a coastal island, and I almost drowned when I was 7 (1983), when I got pulled out by the undertow, but my dad rescued me. I have been through four hurricanes that either hit or came very close.
In highschool, I fell about 45 feet off a cliff while free climbing, and luckily landed at an angle on the slope that tumbled me so that I only broke a foot. (1993)
I learned my military career was kaput when I passed out in the middle of a survival/warfare exercise, only to learn I had an autoimmune problem, in 1995. I also got knocked unconscious when I flipped my catamaran on Lake Claiborne, but was saved by my life vest and buddies. Another hospital stay. Got sick, and due to my aforementioned condition ran a fever of 104.7 degrees F, requiring a giant needle full of penicillin in my left butt cheek. Ow! Soooooo I almost died anyway.
I crashed a motorcycle at 142mph at Oak Hill Raceway in Henderson, Texas. I also crashed at a lot of other speeds, but that one was really spectacular. Luckily it was a low-side, not a high-side crash, so I slid instead of flying... and slid right into an embankment, but at a shallow enough angle that I didn't explode. Just hurt! ('96)
I helped emergency land a Cessna 172 in a field near Lake D'Arbonne, Louisiana, after it "munched a valve" and spewed oil all over my instructor pilot's side of the windscreen. ('97)
My roommate/best friend was run over by a car after a semi tire knocked him off his motorcycle at night. ('98)
I spent the night in jail in Palestine (pal-uh-steen), Texas, after beting trapped by 13 sheriffs, 2 state troopers, and 2 local cops because we went down a deliberately-set "motorcycle trap" road, and were going 155 in a 55. I almost died when I crested a hill and they had blocked the road with their cars; I clipped one and damaged my bike, but managed to "shoot the gap" at over 100mph. They let us off by writing it down to 89 in a 55, so they didn't have to charge us criminally, assuming we'd sign an agreement to pay at the full rate for 155. We agreed immediately. ('99)
I got involved in a 3-bikers-vs-3-rednecks potentially lethal fight at an east Texas bar we didn't know was for racists, literally; when our 4th member (black guy) went out to check on the bikes and have a cigarette, they jumped him and beat him pretty badly with axe handles/clubs, and were plainly trying to kill him and haul him away. When we showed up, they tried to use the same cudgels on us, but we were all ex-military and martial arts trained, so we just put on our helmets (and were already wearing armored racing leathers... the jacket in my profile pic) and beat them bloody until the cops arrived. The cops in that small town took a report, took our names, and we never heard anything again. Jerome even got a bill for the ambulance ride and hospital visit! (2000)
I was arrested because of my long hair and a misidentification, and held for 2 hours in the police holding tank because I refused to talk to them except to demonstrate my alibi, while they checked out that alibi - I was helping a professor present a paper at a speech given in another speech at the time of the crime, and he was kind enough to come down and spring me. On the way out, one cop remarked that I should maybe think about cutting my hair "so this doesn't happen again". ('01) I graduated soon after, and moved away as soon as I got a job... unfortunately, it was in Oklahoma, where my girlfriend was to attend graduate school (briefly, as it turned out).
Almost immediate on arriving there, I met an old friend of hers who was pregnant and wanted to go have an abortion, but was afraid of the picket lines and her boyfriend had bailed on her for the most part, so I took her and got to meet the Crazies. The clinic was nice on the inside, though, execpt for the women in the waiting room staring at me like I was a deadbeat dad!
I got into a fistfight with a Creationist in Oklahoma City traffic (!!) at a stoplight, when he saw me laugh out loud at his "I believe in the Big Bang: God spoke and BANG! it happened." bumper sticker. ('02) I was also in a Tornado that struck my workplace in May of '03, just before I moved away from there to Kansas City in '03.
After that, my life was pretty calm until I was framed in late '05 by the girl who forced me to move to Oklahoma in the first place, and then to Kansas (to go to KU for a better program), and sent to prison for 9 years minus two days on fabricated, inadmissible evidence and her testimony, which was later shown to be fraudulent on both counts. Much later. I've detailed much of what sucks about prison, so I won't detail the highlights of each year for y'all. Trust me, most of it you don't want to know anyway. At least I didn't have to deal with rape or much violence; the only time I was sexually assaulted, he barely laid a hand on me before I ran his head into the underside I-beam of a metal staircase and cracked his skull, resulting in new charges which were dropped (with apologies, I admit) by the DA after only one night in the local county's isolation cell. Since he outweighed me by 100 pounds, and everyone saw him grab me but me throw him (never grab a grapplier!), no one else messed with me. Reputation is everything, the one part the films about prison actually get right.
Luckily, before I went down, I had met my Beloved, and she knew all that my ex did, so she--being amazing--not only offered to have my child, she stuck with me faithfully through nine years of hell for me, and loneliness for both of us, vowing we would try again when I was free. And now, SUCCESS!
Wow... I'm more the "and then I got home" kind of guy.
