At least until you begin to words out… 
Anyway. 1994. I’ve just finished a jazz gig with a friend in Deadsville, IA. It’s late. No place to go except the local pancake chain. He orders coffee. I ask for decaf. I have a 60 mile drive home.
Thank Og for rumble strips, is all I’m gonna say. And I was just about to my exit, too.
I think you have the makings of a great indie-rock ballad there.
Back packing solo in Tibet. Several days hoof from the nearest road, I decided to take a short cut instead of staying on the trail. Went from climbing up a steep slope to a crumbly cliff face with a 45 pound backpack. I got to where I could’nt go up or go down and thought I’d fall off. Finally managed to angle over and got over the lip onto the mountain. For the last 3-4 meters I had to take off the back pack, push it in front of me an inch at a time. Man that was one dumb ass thing to do back packing alone.
Probably many times that I was too stupid to recognize. But one that stands out.
Back when I was about 12, we had an old Ford tractor with a weed cutter on the back of it. Used it to cut the grass on our 5 acres.
We would gas it up with jerry cans. The gas tank was on top of the engine. To start this thing, you had to short out the starter motor against the block (it had some issues). Lots of sparks. You always end up spilling some gas when you fill it………Sometimes a 12 year old lifting a 5 gallon can spills a lot of gas. Why I didn’t go up in flames I’ll never know.
Happened last summer. Was doing some maintance on the roof tops of some commerical buildings. There were several buildings jammed toether and they werent all the same size so one extended about 12 feet higher than the one I was on. It didnt have a ladder so I just took a running start, jumped, and grabbed the ledge and pulled myself up. When I had to come down, I was farther down than where I came up. The drop looked too far so I decided to jump onto a ledge that was halfway down first. It was about 3 feet wide. One side was the other roof, the other was a 50 foot drop onto pavement. Like an idiot I jumped anyways. The rooftops are covered in this rubber material and there is a little give on it. When I hit the ledge I literally bounced back to the lower roof. A couple of degrees and it would of been nasty.
This wasn’t me but I was involved. I’m convinced I saved my friend’s life.
We had got ahold of some Lawn Darts (the type banned for obvious reason) and were tired of playing the game by the book. We began to play the ‘practice hunting squirrels in trees’ version. Matt threw the dart straight up through the leaves and branches. It went waaay up, then straight down. I was a few yards away and saw what he couldn’t due to the leaves. I pushed Matt out of the way just as the dart hit the sidewalk exactly where he had been standing. It made a little puff of concrete dust and gouged the sidewalk. I can still picture what would have been a yellow dart sunk into his skull up to the fins.
I’m not sure what any of this means, but it would make an excellent opening sentence to a novel.
And damn you, Roland Orzabal. My heart is racing just from reading your story. I was almost too scared to finish it. I have this thing about heights and you wrote that really well.
I decided to go duck hunting in a new spot I had found by looking at some topo maps, looked like about a half mile hike through the swamp to get to open water. So I threw a dozen decoys or so into a mesh bag, put on my waders, grabbed my dog and my gun and headed out.
When I got to the swamp there was a thick mat of decomposing cattails and other vegetation that sort of floated on top of the muck. It seemed to support my weight so I was pleased, made the hike a lot easier than trying to slog through the mud and water. So merrily worked my way toward the open water. Suddenly I took a step and immediately plunged through the floating mat of vegetation into soupy muck and mud, submerged to just below my armpits. I had thrown my arms out to my sides when I started to fall and so my shoulders and head were above the surface, but the mat was not sturdy enough for me to pull myself out. I couldn’t move my legs because the mud was too thick. I began to realize that I was well and truly stuck. And that it was late afternoon. And that no one knew where I was.
Thankfully I didn’t panic. My dog came up and licked my face and I told him to go for help, but I guess he doesn’t have any Lassie in him. So I worked the bag of decoys I was carrying off of my back and brought them around to my chest, they were the only means of flotation I had. My waders were pushed tight against my legs from the pressure of the mud and water, so I unbuckled myself from them and laid my chest down over the bag of decoys. I slowly started to float out of my waders and was able to push a little with my legs once I was able to move them. After about 10 minutes or so I was free. I crawled very carefully back to the last safe spot I had stood and very cautiously mad my way back the way I had come.
Since then I never go hunting without leaving specific directions to where I am going to be and when I expect to be. back
Why this idea entered my mind, and why I thought it would be funny to try it escapes me. I can’t remember my reasoning for the life of me. I must have been in the 9th grade or so. I was sitting on the floor in my class, and had a notebook with a spiral metal binder holding it together. The not-so-smart part of my brain looked at metal wire binding, and electric outlet in wall. What compelled me is inexplicable. I can still see myself unravelling about 3 inches of wire and giggling to myself. Only by the grace of Og did I stop short of the outlet long enough to take my hand off the wire binding to hold onto the paper portion of the notebook. Into the socket the wire went, there was a huge BOOM and smoke, the notebook and myself blew away from the outlet screaming. The entire class stopped and looked, teachers face in awe. I suddenly (duh!) realized how stupid the idea was and made up a song-and-dance about how I’d been gesticulating and the wire just happened to hit the socket. There was a 6 inch burn mark on the wall above the socket for the rest of the year.
Really, I’m not that dumb anymore. Seriously.
One time I was using a ram set to drive nails into my basement floor. The rig was acting up on me and not firing, so I pushed the barrel in with my finger while looking at it and quite nearly pulled the trigger. It was then I had a Wile E Coyote revelation “what in heaven’s name am I doing?” and didn’t pull the trigger.
Another time in college I was about to clean the deep fat fryers. We had a tank that cleaned the oil, and you had to connect the tube on the tank to the spigot on the deep fat fryer to drain it. I had knelt down in front of the fryer and was about to open the spigot when I realized that I hadn’t yet attached the tube and that I was seconds away from having 350 degree oil pour directly onto my reproductive apparatus. Fortunately for my as yet unborn children, I caught myself in time.
When I was about 5, I went walking on ice that I was told was too thin, but I figured I knew better, and of course I didn’t. The water wasn’t deep but it was fast-running under the ice, and my legs got sucked out. I was flailing at the edge of the hole, which kept breaking away under me, and my 3-year-old sister was too little to do anything right then other than be scared. Fortunately I never went under or anything, finally got to thicker ice and pulled myself out, made sis promise to never tell Mom and Dad, and went in. I blamed the wet snow suit (left dripping in the back hall, having drained much of the water before being discovered) on burrowing around in the snow.
At my last job, I arrived at work first to discover we had a flood on our hands. I stood in ankle deep water fishing out paperwork (dumb) and then submerged powerstrips - really dumb, especially when I got a nice shock from one, and proceeded on to fish out one more plus an ominously-buzzing dictation machine. In my lame defense, I didn’t actually pick those two up with my hand like I did with the first strip.
I had this brand new Mustang GT. Driving in a light rain, roads very wet. I turned to my friend and said, “I wonder if it’ll break the tires loose in high gear at this speed.”
It did.
“Yes, honey, as a matter of fact they do make your ass look big.” 
On a dare, I once asked a group of bikers in Chicago what the fuck they thought they were looking at.
