Okay.

Steve Albini make post about how he fall in the quicksand and he was to die! She was esperienza of almost dead! She was post very funny. Grazie, Steve.

So, okay, maybe you other guy to say story of when you to die almost. When you maybe to die like Steve, like maybe these:

Maybe you to hit car!
Maybe bad guy to shoot you!
Maybe you to marry Courtney Love almost!

These things, they are all to make you to die. Me, I was to die four year ago almost! But she is story for the time later.

So, okay, you other guy. How you die almost?

brad, how great

i will tell this story in modified fake italian, so it is decipherable

also, i will tell only the short version of the story

my lovely wife and i, we were at an outdoor antique market last summer in sandwich, illinois

it was rainy off and on--it would rain very heavily for a bit, then stop

this went on and on, until finally the exhibitors tired of moving their tarps on and off their stuff, and they just left the tarps on

this made for poor antique viewing, and we decided to leave

as we were leaving, another burst came

we took shelter under a tent. the rain came down more heavily. the wind kicked up. two men and i were holding the tent poles to keep the thing intact, while the women held up the furniture under the tent. 'watch your heads! this tent is gonna go!' i said. 'we're ok, no we're ok' the guy who owned the booth said.

then whoof! i am on the ground all of a sudden. the tent, she is gone. the high boys, they are blown over.

we left the area where the tent was and made a futile attempt to get to our car. the upshot is that we ended up spending about fifteen minutes huddled with a woman, her mother, and her two tiny twin daughters behind a ford explorer in the parking lot. i would try to look over the top of the explorer, to find our car, but it was like being blasted in the face w/a fire hose. 77mph wind, pouring rain. it was called a severe thunderstorm, but there was no thunder. wtf?

i call this 'near death' b/c after the family got a lift out, and just the two of us were stuck behind the car, it got very very bad, even windier (it couldn't get any more rainy than a sheet of rain). when you have been in that kind of weather, where you cannot walk, and people are crawling on all fours, and it's gone on a while, and then it gets WORSE...you can't help but start wondering if you're in a tornado and you're agonna die!

the young woman who was behind the explorer kept saying 'what do you call this? what do you call this?'

but we didn't die--we got a lift to our car (about thirty feet away), the storm went away, no one was killed, etc.

the end!

So many the near death experience. So reckless were the times in my youth. These one, she makes the best almost-death story, for me.

I wasa with some of my good friends from about 12 years before. We wasa just hanging out by the train highway overpass. I was not with the girlfriend, so when I have my big idea (to climb to the underneath of it) my friends say cool. I begin my climb, but the way down is much farther of-a big drop then I think, so I slip. I roll over, and form the waist on up is now the upside-down, and my legs wasa standin straight up in the air, and my right arm and face isa pressed up against the tall highway wall. I'm staring twenty feet from the big guardrail face-plant, with so many a fast car and truck waiting to smoosha my guts out good. So lucky that my left hand found some grip. My legs flopped down, but isa still stuck out there, cause if I move the gravity center, Splat! So I'ma yellin for some help, but my friends they cannot hear (or just don't want to listen). The cars and the Semi-truck van, they'sa honkin horns likea they think I'm the stunt-man. Finally my very good friend Dave, he climbsa down and pulls me up on the ledge. Many thanks, friend Dave. No one called me asshole, they still said,"cool," but I was. Asshole.

Ahhh, yes, this she is a good thread.

As memories uncurl, it pauses me, the number of times that badness things they occur....but to start, roll out the smallest, and perhaps the most of scary:

Fourteen strong years of the earth, I am "hiking" at the Devil's Lake in WI. The Devil's Lake, she is a beautiful old lake encompassed by hills of the large boulder-type. I say "hiking" like so, but means the actual progressive climb of numerous of boulders, upwardly.

Any rate, fun is happening! Am feeling of the mountain goat of Alps! With the leaping and such!

I goat close to the top, now, there is dilemma - go up steeply, or back down and around. Mountain Goats, they no back down, what with the headbutting and the eating of everything - I go forward!

This climb part, she is tricky, she takes the cunning of the goat to move assuredly. I am making the excellent of decisions and moving upward, when I am confronted by not a 90 degree ledge, but rather a 120 degree angle, and no way to get down and no rope to help, nor bush to strain roots.

I go up hoist and hold and suddenly am stuck, with fulcrum point at liver position - cannot reach any handhold, cannot find foothold. I strain and strain and then finally reach and grip and pull up and have foothold and then...loose handhold.

You know feeling that you get in one second when messing around and leaning back on chair, and realize that you are going over and mostly you catch it and sometimes not?

Sometimes not was happening!! I was losing!! Losing!! One second, she last infinite cosmic!! I will myself "YOU WILL NOT FALL STUPID ASSHOLE FUCK!! NOT!! NOT!! NOT!! NOT!! STUPID FUCK!!

Then fugue state.

Then, I find myself at top of ridge, with the giant pulse and the stupidness of live-drain adrenaline, and massive, the scratches.

But I live!

I was still in the time of the last year of the high school. I was drinking the beer. Lots of the beer. Probably she was the Stroh's. I was supposed to be home by a certain time on the clock but that time on the clock, she was over. I finally decide to get in the little Dodge Aries K car of the parents to get on to the home. No style this little K car. But also no pleasant lack of style this little K car. This is a horrible car, this little K car. (This is same little K car that my own father would later almost become of the dead in all by himself. This father of mine he tries to pull out the stump from the missing tree using this little K car. He ties a the rope, she is long and stretchy the rope, to the trailer hitch. And the knot she is very good! He normally like to pull around the fishing boat with this trailer hitch, that why he know all the good knots! But now he decide to try to pull around the tree stump. So he get in the little K car and start giving it the gas. The little K car she start pulling and he is giving it more the gas, the rope she is stretched, then more the gas, then more the stretched, then more the gas, then more the stretching, then the stump, she comes loose, this father of mine he slams on the breaks but the stump she has no of the brakes - she's a coming, coming like a the Peter North rocket ship. She blasts through the back window shield of the little K car - she still like a the Bob Gibson with the fastball this stump. She whizzes past, just millimeters from my father's head, and she crashes through the front window shield and finally she skids to a halt out on the road in front of the little K car.) It is very late now and I is very of the drunken variety. The ride home she takes about twenty minutes of the clock. I is taking some of the involuntary naps along the way. Oh so sleepy! And so much of the beer on the breath! I take small nap again. Just for second or two my mind decides. But a long loud horn she wakes me up. The little K car she filled with light. The light she very, very bright. Like the hitchhiking sun is now riding in the back seat this light. But no! It is not the sun! It is the train! The train that's gonna kill me! But somehow it missed. The little K car she crossed the tracks just in the nick of the clock! Just like in the Hollywood!

Everything I keep thinking of involves bikes or public transportation and somehow I feel like that’s cheating. If you’re not reconciled to your own death when choosing to transport your ass by bike or CTA then you’re willfully deluding yourself. I forgot about weather and K cars too--both have also allowed me a glimpse at the face of death.

Anyway, once I was catching a bus in London and you know they have this absurd thing where there’s no door, you just step up into the bus- very civilized. (can you imagine how many Americans would die every day if buses had no doors?) And there’s this poor shmuck who walks around the goddamned moving bus taking people’s money. Talk about a recipe for psychosis. These guys really fascinated me and if I could get some grant to do empirical anthropological research these guys would be my fodder. I mean here they are in the politest country in the world, under more duress than perhaps any other working human being if you factor in the entire scope of their job. Just having to stay standing in a moving bus would be qualification enough. But while wearing a fanny pack full of change, climbing up and down stairs and most importantly, forcibly extracting money from probably, statistically speaking, the most sociopathic, self- interested percentage of the population- i.e. bus passengers- whose entree into the money collector’s domain is not even restricted by a door- that’s balls.

So I’m waiting for a bus, number 7, on Oxford Road right at it’s western end before the bus would turn onto a busy thoroughfare and rapidly pick up speed. I’d already walked the whole length of Oxford Road while waiting for a bus but none had come. I was now on the opposite side of the street and once the bus turned it would be going too fast for me to catch. But wouldn’t you know this is the exact moment when the bus decided to appear, and such is the bus rider’s mindset that he loses his faculties of cool calculation under such circumstances. So like a starved dog to a bone, I ran into oncoming traffic, running after the bus in the middle of the road, seeing only red, while the bus picks up speed and prepares to depart the gridlock of Oxford Road onto the multi- lane thoroughfare with as much gusto as you can imagine a hopelessly behind schedule bus would muster.

So in the space of maybe five seconds I’m totally at the point of no return there behind the bus, trapped on both sides by traffic, running faster and faster to match its rapidly increasing speed when I discover that the bus is absolutely filled to its maximum point. The money collector himself was at the very periphery of the bus, back to me, only holding on by the two poles that are at either side of the entrance-–in other words blocking all entry to the bus. I won’t describe the look on this guy’s face when he finally turns around to see me. I simply became the perfect embodiment of every psycho, asshole passenger who had ever wronged him in the past, breaking every social code in English society in the way only an American could- and he was clearly cognizant that in a court of law there would be no question who would be at fault for my death in this situation. This was his chance to exact revenge in the most determinate way, pre- exonerated. Why he turned benevolent and moved aside to let me on the bus I’ll never know. But at the absolute last possible second that it was possible for me to jump on that bus given the speed the bus had reached versus the parameters of human stamina he did, indeed, move aside.

stack, how horrible to experience, but how lucky to live!

funny thing, my grandparents, they used to own a k car

terrible terrible car

and one time my grandfather (r.i.p.), who was a very very bad driver, was driving me home from their cabin at the flathead lake in montana

it was a sunny day and i dozed off in the passenger seat of the k car

then i woke up to honking

we were in the left lane of a two-lanes highway, trying to pass a car

but there was oncoming traffic in the left lane!! and these traffic, they had to drive onto their shoulder to not make a head-on collision!

one of the traffic, he was on a motorcycle, biker with long hair, and he has given to my grandfather a gesture like the flicking of the front teeth with the thumbnail, only it only involved the middle finger of one hand

Holy shit!,

The sudden realization has overtaken me. I too was in a serious car crash a very short two weeks ago, in a very similar variation K car the 90's version Saturn, with none other than: friend DAVE at the wheel. We wasa cut off by a big drunk pulling the boat trailer. We was on the way home from the bars, so I should call him the more-drunk-than-us guy. The boat, she almost hits us, but Dave, with the quick driving like Hazardous Dukes, hits the brakes and then he makea the swerve. We hit the concrete side construction guardrail say..bout 20 feet before we'da been deep ditch diving. The seatbelts were very strong in a car that is not so strong, we are so lucky to hit the wall witha the car, and not the windshield witha the face. Still in trouble though; boat trailer guy does not stop, and friend Dave is in danger of Police intervention. Not to worry, good Samaritan girl,named Donna (likea the Madonna), appears out of nowhere ina the Buick Century. She wants to call the emergency, but we wasa pretty O.K., so us, we ask her for the ride instead. The front of car, she looks likea the can of sardines, but everybody O.K. I do not thank friend David so much for this one. She was good luck from bad luck. Still, not dead!!

I was driving this K car in the remotest stretches of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in winter 1991. Sonic Youth had just come out with Goo and that’s what I was listening to. I have not hitherto assessed what relation the badness of that album might perhaps subconsciously have had on the events I’m describing. A serious blizzard started up with practically no warning and I was not able to get to traverse- able or plowed roads or even a populated area before a lot of accumulation started building. The styrofoam essence of a K car when confronted with slippery substances below its tires renders all braking capabilities absurd and when I gave the brakes the tiniest little tap to attempt the most gradual slowdown all hell broke loose. The car slipped and slided and turned and rolled and did all kinds of gymnastics until we were backwards in a ditch, looking up at the clear blue sky, without a scratch, Goo still playing unscathed in the tape deck. Twenty seconds of the most violent, tumultuous tossing and turning followed by hardly an indication that it had even begun, not even any witnesses. It was almost like the tree making a noise when it falls in the forest thing.

one year ago from tomorrow...x-mas eve...I was walking back to my place circa 7pm which was located in 3rd ward. My house at the time was directly under the freeway, and there was always people loitering with booze and crack and such. Long story short, 2 black kids put a gun in my face and ask for my wallet. I tried to avoid eye contact while explaining that I had no money, but they were welcome to my skateboard, wallet, and watch. Naturally, as I took off the Champion watch my mom got me that year ( it actually came free with some socks I believe), the band breaks in one big pathetic display. They thumbed through my wallet and threw it back finding it empty and wished me a good night. Still thought I was going to get the bang bang in the back as I was walking away...amateurs!