Please don't tell Allstate Insurance Company that I have a blog

I have been in a few car accidents over the years. 

I have been in my fair share of auto accidents over the years.

I'm going to level with you. I have wrecked the fuck out of just about every car I have ever got behind the wheel of. No joke. I simply excel at taking a shiny, unspoiled marvel of engineering that wants nothing more than to transport me from point A to point B in the most efficient and comfortable way possible, and transforming it into a hulking, multi-ton, mangled cluster of steel and plastic. Then I buy another one and do it all over again. It's the circle of life, or something. What's really interesting here isn't even that I'm good at wrecking cars. In fact, I'm pretty certain that for every time my fifteen minute commute to work ends up taking over an hour and a half, there is some jackass exactly like me to blame for it. No, what impresses me the most is that I have never been the least bit injured in any of those accidents. Well, technically I got an airbag burn on my wrist once, but that doesn't really count. That was the car's fault, not mine. Automobile safety features aren't medications - getting injured shouldn't be a side effect brought on by the device designed to protect you from injury. Just saying.

Anyway, I must have a guardian angel looking out for me. I mean, just think about the level of skill it takes to completely flip an SUV down a cliff (multiple times), or slam a pickup truck into a car hard enough to do three rotations in the middle of the interstate and spew the entire contents of the truck bed into both the northbound AND southbound ditches. Yeah, been there, done that. Unscathed.

Let me tell you about one such event...

I wasn't even driving the first time I experienced the thrill of flipping multiple times in an automobile. I was fourteen, had just started High School, and was hanging out with this twenty-one year old guy I knew from church. He had a Ford Mustang and (for some reason that baffles me when I look back at it) liked to hang out with High School kids such as myself. We were coming back from a movie. (I really hope it was Mortal Kombat, just because that movie came out around the time this story took place, I remember seeing it in the theater, and it sucked so much ass that it's funny to imagine that God was punishing me for spending six actual earth dollars to see it) Regardless, It was raining and Joel was speeding, he took a sharp turn too fast, and bing, bang, boom we're upside down in a ditch. Did I mention it was freezing outside? Like, not "I'm a Floridian so anything under 70 degrees is freezing" freezing. It was actually below 32 degrees outside...and we were upside down...in a ditch full of water...and a few of us were holding sodas left over from the movies. You know those 64 ounce soda cups produced by Satan himself that are so large they don't even fit in your car's shitty little cup holder? Yeah, we had purchased those. Needless to say, sometime between being upright and enjoying life and hanging upside down in a smoking car in the ditch our beverages launched themselves out of their respective cups and spilled all over each and every one of us in the car.

We crawled out of the car and called a tow truck, which came and delivered our sticky, shivering bodies to the nearest gas station. The tow truck driver dropped us off and promptly left. We kind of just sat there silent for a few minutes. We were all too young to drive, and aside from Joel we didn't know anyone else who was cool enough to leave their home at eleven thirty at night to come pick us up. The unspoken truth was that one of us was going to have to call our parents to pick us up. My friend Bryan ended up drawing the short straw and made the call to his dad for a ride back into town. We grew up in the middle of nowhere, so it was a good hour drive from where we lived to the actual movie theater...and in the meantime we would certainly freeze to death.

I don't know if Joel had previous experience as a hobo, or whether he just had a stroke of ingenuity in this particular situation, but he came up with a solution that, while embarrassing, got the job done. He went over to the newspaper machine, put in a few quarters, and grabbed every single newspaper in the box. We huddled together like little hibernating animals in the dead of winter and spread the newspapers over top of us to shield the cold. It worked, despite a few sneers from the cars passing by. Eventually Bryan's dad showed up, bitched Joel out something fierce, and then took each one of us home. The end.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah - trashed cars. I've had a lot of those. Check out the ones I can actually remember off hand - 

• Blew the engine by driving too fast with no coolant ('74 Volkswagen Beetle) 
• Rear ended another car in the rain ('91 Honda CRX) 
• Girlfriend angrily jumped into the car on top of me while I was trying to leave her house and caused me to run into her dad's fence ('91 Honda CRX)
• Tried to merge into traffic in the rain and slid into the guardrail ('91 Honda CRX)
• Made a blind turn into traffic and was sideswiped by oncoming traffic - totalled car ('94 Honda Prelude)
• Took the interstate off-ramp too quickly, skid off the side and flipped several times down the embankment - totalled car (2001 Isuzu Rodeo)
• Ran into the driver's side of a car that pulled out in front of me - totalling both cars ('94 Toyota Pickup)
• Rear ended a rental car at a stop light (2004 Isuzu Rodeo)
• Made a left turn into traffic and was hit by another car ('96 Mitsubishi Eclipse)
• Rear-ended the car in front of me while looking at my phone ('2008 Mazda 3)
• Rear-ended the car in front of me while looking at my phone AGAIN, in the same exact intersection ('2008 Mazda 3)

You get the point.
It's actually been four years since my last car accident. Pray for me.