A long time ago I heard a comedian make a joke that everyone is immortal until they die and are proven wrong, because you never know, you could be immortal. I've lived by that philosophy for the longest time and I've just pretended that I will never die, that I am in fact immortal.
So when I was told to sit down and analyze my life in it's entirety by my parents as a joke, I decided I really should do it. My life pretty much comes down to the fact that while I'm not acting out the final scene of The Deer Hunter, I have done a lot of dumb shit in my short time on this Earth either by accident or because I thought it was a "good idea."
There is a video somewhere in this world of me doing a back flip off of a train bridge while a train is coming down the tracks. It's not like I planned to wait for a train then jump when it came near, it just happen to be that I was bridge jumping with some friends and a trained showed up, so I waited around like a dumb ass. The back flip was something I added in the end because I thought it would be more amazing, like some action movie. Turns out, it was amazing and I'm still waiting for Hollywood to call and give me my own action movie called Black Dynamite. Oh wait, that already is a movie. Fuck.
Almost a year ago I wrote about how I do stupid things and nothing bad ever happens, and I feel it's the same way with this issue. I can't really count how many times I've almost lost a body part, or been in a situation where I should have just died.
I jumped out of a plane on my 18th birthday. I woke up, figured I should do something exciting, so I got in my car, bought my first pack of cigarettes legally, then drove 45 minutes and paid $165 to jump out of a plane. When I pulled the chord to open my main chute, it didn't open. Luckily, my back up chute deployed and I floated through the clouds. To me, my main chute not deploying made the experience 500 percent more enjoyable. It's kind of fucked up when I think about it.
One time I pulled out in front of a woman in my car who was speeding down a road, causing her to swerve off the road. I leaped out of my car and sprinted to hers to make sure she was okay. We looked at her car and there wasn't a scratch on it. We even laughed about how fucked up that was. She told me she wasn't going to call the cops because she was late for work again and she was going to get fired if she didn't make it on time today. She left, I got back in my car and wondered how in the world did I force the perfect person off the road. I happen to get the woman who was habitually late for work and was carefree enough to laugh about the fact that I almost killed us both and destroyed our cars. I even went to her work later to tell her boss that I was the reason she was late, and that if she said some dumb kid forced her off the road that it was me and she wasn't lying. I figured I owed her at least that much.
So I'm starting to wonder, when does my good fortune run out, or is it even possible to run out of something like luck? Maybe I really am destined to live forever, that even when bad things happen, they happen in the best possible way to leave me unscathed physically and mentally. I guess I have a few options now. I can keep recklessly steering myself into harmful situations, tone down the intensity of my recreational activities , or I can live what I consider to be an uneventful life and quit pretending I‘m a rock star. Hmmm, what is a man supposed to do?
Song of the Day: Duane Joseph by The Juliana Theory. It can be found on the album Understand This Is A Dream.