5/22/04 8:43 AM: I don't know how to begin.

Last night I was at this bar in Playa del Rey called the Prince of Whales. I was doing a fill in karaoke host spot for my homegirl and co-worker Dana, who's in Texas visiting her brother. The gig went fine, and I was getting ready to load the equipment into the car.

The diminutive Irish bouncer tells me, "there's a spot right out front, you can pull your car in there." I shrug, trying to save myself maybe fifteen feet of walking with heavy crap, and moved the car.

As I was loading our bigger-than-it-needs-to-be pre-amp into my backseat (perhaps five minutes later), a black Toyota 4Runner doing maybe fifty plows into my open driver's side door. I was standing in said open door as this SUV soars less than a foot behind me. Bang.

As you can see in the photo, that didn't go well for me. The door, now, simply will not close. I have the car parked below me in my locked garage stall (thank spirit that I don't park in front anymore, at least that's one good thing). I have cleared virtually every item of value of mine out of the car (since I expect, I dunno, feral cats to be living in it by the time I can return to it). Funny side note -- found an old throwaway pair of sunglasses my ex-wife left in my glove compartment, so she'd never be without shades. Ha.

It's been a long time since I had a legitimate brush with death. After the accident, people kept saying how glad they were that I wasn't hurt, and until I was home in bed it didn't really dawn on me how close I was to being spread across Culver Boulevard like warm butter. I've become very boring in the last few years, so brushes with death aren't as common as they once were. I am left unprepared to be staring so closely at my own mortality.

The guy pulled in way down the street (as I said, he was hauling ass like a dump truck fulla strippers) and came back to talk and trade info. He appears to have money -- a surfboard in his back seat, expensive accoutrements, and so on. I don't think this will be like the last car accident where the guy was secretly uninsured (that case is still pending, heh). Mercury Insurance will probably admit to knowing this guy, will probably spot me a rental, and will probably cover the door repairs. Which is a good thing. Mostly.

The fact that this is yet another inconvenience in what's becoming an Iliad-length litany of them is more of an issue. I don't think I really realized how shaken I was. After the accident, I just kept laughing and laughing. I said, "if this was on TV, this would be the most hilarious isht in the world." I put the alarm on, out of reflex, after I finally had the car loaded (I moved the pre-amp up to my apartment, as it's all that's not secure in the trunk, just BTW), and that sent me into gales of hysterical laughing. When I tried to close the door (which at first wouldn't even go past a perpendicular angle, but finally went "ktunk" against the edge of the car, as the latch is completely shattered), again I howled with guffaws. Driving home, I had to hold the door so it wouldn't fly open, turning the car quite chilly. More mad gigggles. While talking to the police (who took an hour and a half to show up), I was positively giddy. I accepted the hugs and shoulder pats with a kind of detached calm that, now I think about it, could have been shock. I don't know.

Another funny side note: out of raw frustration, I stopped at the Popeye's on Jefferson and La Brea -- some might remember it as the place former police chief Bernard Parks' daughter/relative/somebody was shot to death. As I'm getting the chicken, I take off one of my beloved Isotoner gloves ... and it simply disappears into the wind. Gone. I scoured the site, under the car, and everywhere. Just plain gone. Another loss in an evening racked with them.

At some other points, I'd remarked to myself that Culver is just too freaking narrow at that point, much like Highland between Wilshire and Melrose. The space between parked car and driving car is simply too small, with too tiny a margin for error. I'd never thought of it very seriously, just chalking it up to the same half-assed urban planning this region is wracked with. But last night, if I'd have just left my car in the lot, or if I'd have gone five minutes longer on karaoke, or any of a million variables (as I'd normally not even be at the Prince on a Friday), things would have gone differently. But they didn't, so dwelling on "could-have-beens" is a really dumb waste of time.

So at 7:30 this morning, I just wake up, a lot of these thoughts nagging me into consciousness. After going to bed at almost 4 AM, that's less funny, but still pretty odd. I'm not a morning person. Waking up in the morning is not my bag. So I'm out of sorts and mixed up. I did manage to get a claim number from Mercury and get the whole process on the road (ha ha ha ha ha). I'll be calling the guy back later on.

As funny as I considered this all last night (when I called my boss Nigel, he said, "Man, you're just having one bad string of luck!" I replied, "So it appears ..."), this morning it made me very sad (another reason not to be up in the morning). I had a really ugly thought that, two years ago, this wouldn't have even slowed me down because I was in a place with greater economic security, not because of the money I made but because of the relationship I was in. One of the reasons, I reasoned, to be in such a situation was the ability to pool resources and more easily overcome challenges. My own ability to recover from this sort of thing (when I got rear-ended on Barrington in 2000, I paid $500 out of pocket to fix my car without even batting an eye) is likewise hindered by that horrible mistake. The money I would have available for a wide variety of things is quitely earning equity on 52nd Street and Manhattan Avenue.

Today I'm extra mad at myself for making that horrible, horrible mistake, on top of feeling like the universe pinned a big freakin' "kick me" sign on my spiritual ass.

So I've gotta figure how I'm gonna get the equipment to the gig tomorrow. I've gotta wait "24-48 business hours" for Mercury to call me back, which could be Thursday for all I know. I've gotta remix some schedules, as I'm no longer actively mobile (since I can't close the door, I don't wanna drive the car anywhere I'd have to park it, for what should be obvious reasons). Above all, I've gotta not let this stress me out, not let this become a major problem for me, because it's only life after all.