Look Left, Look Right

I spazzed out a little bit this year and decided to wholly forgo Turkey-day. It wasn’t a political decision, although there were at least 3 people who assumed as much, and I didn’t do anything to tell them otherwise. I went to two hippie schools where a required activity was engaging in liberal guilt with a lot of other white-ish people, and I can’t deal with more progressively-minded martyrdom. Not this year. This year I didn’t take a summer vacation, which was a mistake because come October 1st I was fantasizing about running away with the circus or inflicting serious bodily harm on almost all of my colleagues. I kept shouting during meetings because my fantasies would dull my ability to control the volume of my voice. I had fallen into a cycle of work, sleep, tears, followed by work and lots of celebrity tabloid gazing with mouth agape and brain a-fried. So I chucked the whole idea of Thanksgiving and jumped, literally skipped, onto a plane headed for London. England.

My trip was great. Here are the highlights: lots of cheese and coffee; a pork belly that was in my top five pig meals of all time which is a big deal because I’ve eaten lots of pig; many laughs with both adults and children; and an almost five mile stroll through town and across the river Thames. Lowlights, of which there is only one: 11 days ago I got hit by a car when it accelerated from a standstill into my body while turning out onto a street. It was certainly uncomfortable—most notably the mirror took out my hip and took no prisoners from my whole side flank. The car came out of an ally, smacked into me and then drove away. Hit and run is really too dramatic a term, but it was unsettling that my body wasn’t even able to stop the car long enough for a chat.

Everyone who hears I got hit by a car in London asks if I looked the wrong way. Strangely enough, I was with a pack of locals and looked the right way. I’ve always had an irrational fear of walking into London traffic. The people in charge of London must know that many foreigners feel this way because they’ve painted helpful little reminders to signal which way oncoming traffic will be coming from. I conquered the pain with massive amounts of arnica cream and hot baths. Only five days after the smack I went to the woods and used a saw to cut wayward branches off fallen trees for firewood.

Once I got on the plane home, the pain came right back. I don’t know whether it was the realization that my getaway was coming to an end or because sitting in a chair packed with other people for 7 hours undid all the tip-top work of the arnica and baths. Either way, I’ve been looking all ways now. I perform a jerky four-pointed check at most streets—left and right for oncoming traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, and up and down for a general poop check from bird or dog.