How close to death have YOU been...

Same war, different country. But not far.Omni walking point. Man Behind keeps getting too close, Omni keeps waving him back.Omni comes to road, stops stoops looks listens smells feels...nothing, something...Omni signals, starts across road. Don't step there, Omni, too smooth. Bugs too quiet, birds erupt a klick away...Man Behind follows too close. Omni about to wave him back, freezes: something smells...wrong.Man Behind steps off Omni's track to see past Omni. Bad move. Don't step there...*click*Man Behind shoves Omni into ditch ahead. Land mine bounces up and blows Man Behind into a thousand pieces.Omni never liked Man Behind. Too slack, too new, too young, too scared, not scared enough. Screw-up. Get us all killed.Man Behind saved Omni's life one second, ceased to exist the next.Omni on his back in the ditch, staring at the blue sky, still. Still.

The very quiet 6 year old boy heard the shouting and hitting again and hid beneath his bed. His sister knew where he would hide and pulled him out--the boy and his sisters ran with their mother to the garage behind the house.Why are you crying Mommy? Why are we in here Mommy?Mommy tells the oldest sister Daddy has been very bad, and Mommy found out, and now Daddy says he will shoot us all.The little boy thinks about what his Daddy's gun does to rabbits. He likes rabbits. He hates that gun. The little boy wanders around the dark garage until he finds a length of pipe. Then he hides again.The police come and take Daddy's gun, then Daddy. The police open the garage and Mommy and sisters leave. Then they remember the little boy. When the cop peers into the garage, the little boy almost takes his head off with the pipe: "Whoa, little man! You ready to go to war or what?! C'mon out, it's okay now."It wasn't okay. It would never be okay. It would be a long time before the little boy stopped haunting that garage.He hid the pipe under his bed.

Omni is 17, footloose and way, way out, man. The very quiet little boy is very far inside now, covered with a decade of tough.Omni is trucking down Talbott Ave., Naptown's answer to Haight-Ashbury. It is the Summer of Love.The grand old Victorians and ginger-breaded craftsman houses around him are filled with hippies, yippies, bikers, addicts and revolutionaries. He's there for the drugs.As he reachs an alley, a man lunges into the moonlight with his arm outstretched--just like Zorro, Omni has time to think, absurdly.Omni feels the bump and sting on his chest and looks down to see a knife lodged in it; he looks up at the frightened-looking man who seems as startled as Omni, then punches him hard in the nose. The man with the broken nose gushing blood turns and runs.Omni looks at his chest again. The switchblade is stuck in his sternum, not far in at all, just hanging there by its tip. He pulls it free, surprised at how little blood there is, hardly any pain, and looks at the knife thoughtfully. Nice knife. Lucky knife, really--just an inch to the left and... On the other hand, who knows what other mischief this knife has been up to... He slides the blade between two old bricks and snaps it off, then tosses the lot into the storm sewer.In half an hour he will buy a half pound of weed, only to have it confiscated right outside the door by the cop working with the bent dealer. They probably sold that half pound a hundred times.Stabbed and ripped off in one night, he'll think, and shrug. Within a few weeks his chest will look like it never happened. It's all fascinating, really, one long strange trip.So now he's been beaten and stabbed. He has yet to be shot and burned, he has yet to kill, but Death is already starting to look like an old friend.

Omni is hitchhiking through rural Tennessee, long-haired, tie-dyed, beaded and bangled, lean and hard from a summer carrying hod, and he ain't scared of no crackers.A rumble comes first, like slow summer thunder from the next valley over, and then the bikes. Big bikes. With big fat men on them who pull over and regard Omni silently. Finally, the Angel on the lead bike says, "Boy, you must be stone fuckin' crazy to be thumbin' round here lookin' like that. Find a bike."The internal debate was short--Omni had heard that Angels struggle with rejection. Omni walked down the line of bikes, the first two or three passenger-less riders giving a short headshake, until one Angel nodded, and Omni got on. Omni wondered what that selection thing was about and hoped not to find out.They only made it a few miles before county law enforcement pulled them over. After an exchange of pleasantries, they were all arrested on suspicion of murder. The Angels promised not to attempt escape in return for the privilege of riding their bikes to jail rather than being hauled in cuffed and shackled inside Black Marias. The cops promised to shoot them if they screwed up.It wasn't bad. Free shower, dinner, delousing, haircut and shave, the last submitted to with especially ill grace by the Angels.They were all released the next morning, and the Angels dropped Omni near where they found him, explaining, "No offense, man, but you're bad luck."Omni stood there in wonderment at being found too troublesome to hang with the Angels when a cross-country trucker picked him up. A big red hammer was painted on the truck--Hammer? "That's what I call my truck." What should I call you? "Hammer." They smoked Omni's hash and ate the Hammer's crosses into West Virginia, where the Hammer needed to sleep; but Omni was too wired and found a roadhouse nearby where he could drink the edge off the meth with Wild Turkey.The mood inside didn't seem improved by Omni's new tie-dyed skinhead look. Within half an hour several local roosters had managed to bump Omni and glare as they walked by his bar stool, and Omni sat small, spoke politely, and called for his tab, hoping to hook back up with the eastbound trucker in one piece.Abruptly, one drunk at the bar turned and shoved the other, who staggered back against a third who splashed his beer on a fourth who... The entire bar was between Omni and the door, so he stepped into the tiny Men's room. A janitor's locker stood against the far wall: he toppled it forward so it blocked the door. The noise outside the Men's room steadily: cursing, shouting, thudding, smacking, pounding, pleas to be let in, crashes, screams, breaking glass... Omni sipped his bourbon straight up until, at last, he heard the sweet sound of sirens.Omni wouldn't lift the locker and open the door until a cop showed his badge through a crack in the door. That same cop dropped him at the county line and told him to keep moving.He did.

Yeah, but then most of your friends would be brutish assholes.Edit: changed "are" to "would be" to clarify. Not your friends now, schraf, but the friends you would have then.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 01-24-2006 10:57 PM

I'm happy to hear it, iano.I'm a teddy bear, really.

Thanks, rand.I understand your reticence. I've probably told those stories to no more than a handful of people, until now. The OP struck a chord, though, and loosened my tongue enough to offer a sampler. I think I'm finished, though.My friends like to debate whether I am the luckiest or unluckiest person they know.I come down on the side of lucky: I not only tolerated risk, but actively sought it out. So the perils were merely willful, for the most part, but the survivals were remarkable.

Good for you, Mespo. I feel the same way, and I wish more of our civilian leaders had personal experience of hell on earth. I enjoyed your initial account--you can see how it provoked my own memories--and your comment above even more.Your discussion of what ran through your brain at the instant reminded me of a black box recovered from an airplane that flew into a mountainside a few years ago, the mountain becoming apparent to the pilot just moments before the collision.His last words?"Oh shit."

Well, I hope there's no heavy lifting involved, rand, because I don't have much of that left, now that the spine is patched with titanium and bone grafts.No extended sprints, either, though I can limp along gamely for quite a while on my roto-rootered knees.Still, I like to be useful.

We also serve who sit and cackle.One of those "floating Chinese sages" would make a great sit-down comic.But there would probably be trouble when it was discovered that their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.

Maybe I'm here to improve iano's manners...or to keep his chin tucked in and his left shoulder up.

Yeah...but man what a ride! I rather fancied featuring myself in the monastery's herb garden, world-weary and wise, subverting the stern eccesiasticals with tolerance, compassion and St. John's wort, maybe talking the Abbot out of whipping the novices, reminding the Lord that this isn't as easy at it looks from up there...that kind of thing.

No offense taken, iano: my reply was intended to be playful.