Left or Right

Dusty Reed ran me over.

I was in sixth grade. Brittany and I walked home through Butcherknife Creek every day. Butcherknife was that childhood playland where we would spend every summer afternoon in the swimming hole, or running around releasing pet mice. And the place that creepers would get naked and model pose for us as we walked to school in eighth grade.

But in sixth grade: he ran me over.

Maybe it is just me, but if you say "On your left!" I am going to move right. So then if you come speeding down the hill on your bike and yell "On your left!" but then due to some lack of kindergarten level knowledge go to my right and run me over, I will never forgive you. Literally never because my sixth grade picture was the next day.

After the left but going right incident Brit left me bleeding and freaking out as Dusy rode off without pausing, to tell my mom I got hit. She thus thought a rouge car ran me over (not sure if one would even fit in Butcherknife but a mother in panic might overlook that) only to find me walking home with a massive bloody nose and ego that was about as intact as Baghdad, my closet, or Macy's on Black Friday.

After the whole getting run over incident, I have this twitchy and dive-y reaction to hearing any type of wheels behind me; cars, bikes, skateboards, rollarblades, you name it and I will immediately take cover as if I am about to be the man who got bombed in Nagasaki and survived and then drove to Hiroshima and got bombed again. Or vise versa if they were in the opposite order. Talk about having the worst luck ever- I commonly think that bad luck is just really stupid choices, but in his case, I really think he got the worst luck a person can have.

When walking from the train station to Linnea's house, you can hear every train that goes by. However, when wearing a hat, it sounds exactly like you are four seconds from getting run over... not by Dusty Reed in his manic bike horror, but by a large truck. The fact that they have no large trucks in Sweden doesn't matter: for that second you are positive that a huge Chevy is about to smush you into something resembling a worm on a highly busy sidewalk on a rainy day.

I would just like to ask, for the sake of walkers everywhere, that before you are going to ride a bike, please make sure you can pass the intellectually challenging left or right test. If you can't do so without using your hands, please avoid biking. Because adding a left-right hand test as you try to pass people will only further contribute to the number of bike related homicides that occur each year.