(no subject)

I went to get my belongings out of my car today, now collecting dust and racking up rental fees in a lot in Northridge. The pattern of damage was odd. The driver's side rear end of the car was entirely smashed in and covered with dried mud. The front of the car was also crumpled, though not as badly. Three of the four wheels and wheel wells were crumpled, two of the tires were deflated, and both sides of the car were scratched and dented. The only parts that didn't look like they had hit something really hard were the windows (except for the rear, which was completely shattered), windshield, and roof, and I could have sworn at one point the car landed on the roof.

I also could have sworn that the woman who saw the crash mentioned seeing the car roll, and the dispatch report, which was taken before anyone spoke to me, says "high mechanism, rollover.) The only thing I can think is that the car turned end over end and didn't literally land on the roof, but upside down with the trunk being the point of impact.

Everything was thrown all over the car, with things that had been on the front seat in the rear and vice versa. However, it actually didn't look like the worst accident on the lot. Two cars that had their windshields shattered and the interior of the driver's side were presumably worse, though in one of those the airbags had deployed.

Yes, sorry, I'm still obsessed with this. I think part of the problem is that I have two entirely separate things to agonize over: a huge financial loss which wouldn't have happened if I'd been less careless, and the accident itself. Every moment I stop obsessing over one of them, I start obsessing over the over.

I think what makes this incident different from other close calls I've had, apart from it being the closest, is that the reason nothing happened to me with any of the others was because of actions I took. (Removing myself from the vicinity of the danger, generally.) So I think I tended to interpret them in terms of what my actions said about what kind of person I was: I will risk my life for others. I will travel in dicey areas without fear. But this wasn't something I got into voluntarily, and my survival had nothing to do with what I did.

Maybe what this says is that the universe does not arrange itself according to the narrative you have in your head. You can write your own story insofar as you control the things that you control, but whether you crash or don't crash or live or die when you do is entirely unrelated to any fixation you might happen to have on the American Romantic idea that the single-car crash is the archetypal means of sudden tragic death for someone who's young and talented and up-and-coming and not a drug addict or gangster.

At the tech today one of the actors, who is doing a mime piece, kept insisting that I call cues based on when he smiles and when he frowns. I explained to him that for the actual performance, I would be a booth very far from and high above the stage, and I would probably not be able to see such subtleties. I thought, "I'm having an existential crisis here, and I'm being pestered by a mime."

How can I not see patterns in my life when I am so often confronted, in various permutations, with moments in which I see my life as a grand drama, and it's immediately made clear that it's actually a comedy written by Robertson Davies?

(no subject)

I went to get my belongings out of my car today, now collecting dust and racking up rental fees in a lot in Northridge. The pattern of damage was odd. The driver's side rear end of the car was entirely smashed in and covered with dried mud. The front of the car was also crumpled, though not as badly. Three of the four wheels and wheel wells were crumpled, two of the tires were deflated, and both sides of the car were scratched and dented. The only parts that didn't look like they had hit something really hard were the windows (except for the rear, which was completely shattered), windshield, and roof, and I could have sworn at one point the car landed on the roof.

I also could have sworn that the woman who saw the crash mentioned seeing the car roll, and the dispatch report, which was taken before anyone spoke to me, says "high mechanism, rollover.) The only thing I can think is that the car turned end over end and didn't literally land on the roof, but upside down with the trunk being the point of impact.

Everything was thrown all over the car, with things that had been on the front seat in the rear and vice versa. However, it actually didn't look like the worst accident on the lot. Two cars that had their windshields shattered and the interior of the driver's side were presumably worse, though in one of those the airbags had deployed.

Yes, sorry, I'm still obsessed with this. I think part of the problem is that I have two entirely separate things to agonize over: a huge financial loss which wouldn't have happened if I'd been less careless, and the accident itself. Every moment I stop obsessing over one of them, I start obsessing over the over.

I think what makes this incident different from other close calls I've had, apart from it being the closest, is that the reason nothing happened to me with any of the others was because of actions I took. (Removing myself from the vicinity of the danger, generally.) So I think I tended to interpret them in terms of what my actions said about what kind of person I was: I will risk my life for others. I will travel in dicey areas without fear. But this wasn't something I got into voluntarily, and my survival had nothing to do with what I did.

Maybe what this says is that the universe does not arrange itself according to the narrative you have in your head. You can write your own story insofar as you control the things that you control, but whether you crash or don't crash or live or die when you do is entirely unrelated to any fixation you might happen to have on the American Romantic idea that the single-car crash is the archetypal means of sudden tragic death for someone who's young and talented and up-and-coming and not a drug addict or gangster.

At the tech today one of the actors, who is doing a mime piece, kept insisting that I call cues based on when he smiles and when he frowns. I explained to him that for the actual performance, I would be a booth very far from and high above the stage, and I would probably not be able to see such subtleties. I thought, "I'm having an existential crisis here, and I'm being pestered by a mime."

How can I not see patterns in my life when I am so often confronted, in various permutations, with moments in which I see my life as a grand drama, and it's immediately made clear that it's actually a comedy written by Robertson Davies?