Saturday, August 05, 2006

Good times, and not so good times (to put put it lightly)

Last night, thanks to an invitation from Sacha Chua, I had a great time at Simon Ditner's potluck party. I met a ton of interesting people, and had a ton of interesting conversations. One of the topics that came up was pivotal moments in our lives. Everyone had a story to share, except me, as I claimed I was "too young" to have a pivotal story, trying to get out of telling a story. I promised I'd make it up for next time with a better story, but it seems that "next time" came sooner than expected, as recounted in this text message to Sacha:

Hi Sacha. Great time tonight. Speaking of near death experiences, I just had one. It's 5:19 am [it was actually more like 5:15 when this happened] on sat morning. i'm at yonge & steeles, just got off the blue night yonge bus going home. Standing at the SE corner of the intersection, where the 53 stop usually is. I check the map, and it shows the Steeles blue night stop is actually a little bit east of where i was standing. I begin to walk over there. Not 30 seconds from leaving, I hear a loud noise behind me [actually a series of two loud noises]. I turn around and duck, thinking it may be a gunshot. next all i see is a white van smashing into the bus shelter I had been right next to, even in at one point, almost exactly like someone knocking out the two pillar cards in a three-card house of cards with one swift blow, the shelter roof gliding off onto the road, and dragging to a halt in the middle of the east side of the intersection, its front side completely totaled from the crash, not 30 20 feet away from me. 'Fuck!', I thought to myself (excuse the language). Had I still been standing in that spot (which I would have been had the TTC not chosen to have a different end stop for their night buses as their days buses), I very well may have been dead. Wow...

I would have taken a picture of it but I was too stunned to do so.

I see the 353 Bus arrive, so i scurry over to there, not knowing what else to do. I board the bus and take a seat, and then once settled [I] begin composing this text message to you. I guess this is what I meant when i said (or meant to say), 'my story is yet to come'. How's that for a life-altering story? Hope you got home more safely than i did. Have a good weekend :) -g

That is harsh. I think part of City Optical got messed up as well, judging from the sounds of the crash (I don't know for sure, I didn't stick around). I mean, something like this can seriously affect someone's life. For the remainder of my commute home, I was very wary, even paranoid, about even walking on the sidewalks down Warden Avenue. I kept looking around at the cars on the road, making sure they weren't too close to me. I was relieved when I got home, knowing that I was indoors where no off-trajectory vehicles were likely to crash into me, even then still a bit nerve-wracked about the whole thing. I'm just glad I was able to get home in one piece. I still can't believe what happened...

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