Why I Have Nightmares About Chocolate Chip Pancakes
“A picture is worth a thousand words, usually, unless the picture sucks, in which case it’s not worth anything, or if it’s really good, then it might be worth more, or something.”
So they tell me a picture is worth a thousand words.
What I think: Are two pictures worth two thousand words? What about movies? How many words are those worth?
What they tell me: As a writer, your job is to write what you know.
What I think: Shit! I don’t know anything. What am I supposed to write about?
What they tell me: No, you can’t make your Beefy Five Layer Burrito have triple the ingredients. It’s not a Beefy Fifteen Layer Burrito, you idiot.
What I think: Whoever they are, they’re plotting against me, I just know it…
Anyway, these days my thoughts are so scattered I don’t even know what to believe anymore. I recently learned, for example, that “biweekly” means “twice a week or every other week.” What the fuck? How can it have two competing definitions? (I’m on competing medications, but don’t worry about that. I’m very sane. Can’t you tell?) Nothing can be both twice a week and every other week. Which one is the true meaning? Is this blog really, officially, biweekly? And while we’re asking important questions, is Nic Cage an alien? Was the moon landing faked on the moon? What do all the Sour Patch Kids ads on my twitter timeline mean? Is Geico a shell company for foreign governments, infiltrating our democracy with that fucking gecko? IS ANYTHING REAL? AM I LOSING MY MIND? Well...maybe. I’m sweating. Let’s slow down for a second.
Deep breath. Right. I am invoking the executive power of the English language invested in me by the Oxford English Dictionary editors to hereby declare “biweekly” to mean every other week. Now my blog is officially biweekly. Good. At this time I am also declaring “Geico Gecko” to mean traitor. Right. That little Australian reptile (amphibian? What are geckos?) is plotting the destruction of the United States. I’m sure of it. If you don’t believe me, consider this: do you have Geico? Does anyone you know have Geico? No? Then how do they afford seemingly unlimited numbers of terrible TV commercials? No one knows. Bizarre theories like these are why the Oxford editors didn’t actually invest the power of the English language in me.
If pictures really are worth a thousand words each, though, then I don’t need the English language (except to verbalize the mountain of existential dread that grips me at all times. Even then, words usually fail me), because I have this picture:
No, this is not edited. That bump is real. The red mark below my right eye is blood.
Jesus, look at that fucking goose egg. Hang this photo next to the Mona Lisa. This picture has more life in it than most Van Gogh paintings, more inherent questions than a Christopher Nolan movie, and more cultural relevance than Star Trek. Just kidding. But there is quite the story behind it…
*Setting the stage for GO-KART CRASH SEQUENCE*
Okay. It’s April 2014. You’ve never felt pain. Bruno Mars is about to drop “Uptown Funk” and change your life forever. You’ve made a new friend during your freshman year of high school. You are hanging out at his house for the first time. You are 15 years old and unaware that bad things can happen to people. His mom makes you chocolate chip pancakes and you eat like seven of them at 3 in the afternoon. You weigh about 30 pounds and haven’t started balding yet. Your friend has been telling you about his go-kart and of course you want to ride in it. You climb in, with him driving, and start tearing around his neighborhood, which has gravel roads. After a while of him driving you decide that you want to. You tell him to let you drive and he agrees. You begin driving very fast and feeling very in control.
YOUR FRIEND: Jesus, man, aren’t you going a little fast?...
YOU: Nah, bro, I got this. I’m a great driver.
YOUR FRIEND: Okay…
YOU: See, watch this. I can drift around corners at high speeds with no problem. This is great.
*commercial break. A Geico ad starts playing*
By now you probably have some idea of what happens next. I was driving that go-kart stupidly fast on those gravel roads with Drew “King Utah” Farrell in the passenger seat. That go-kart must have had some Boeing 747 engines on it because we were hauling ass. Neither of us, of course, was wearing a seat belt, and the open-air roll cage ensured that if we hit something maximum damage would ensue.
A corner is coming up ahead. I’m probably driving like 35 or 40 miles an hour. I take the turn without slowing, intending to drift the go-kart smoothly around the corner. Midway through (this is all happening very quickly but also very slowly) the curve two things happen at once: 1) I realize I’ve lost control and we are going to hit something very hard and 2) Drew yells my name—just “Ben!” and then BOOM! it’s Go-kart against Tree and boy does Tree win.
I black out for maybe 3 seconds after impact. The passenger side hit the tree, so Drew has taken most of the force. The go-kart’s metal cage is buckled inward. It went straight into his hip, jarring him so badly he needed physical therapy for his back for months. He doesn’t seem to be able to move. Naturally, I’m freaking the fuck out. I get out of the go-kart shakily and start dropping more f-bombs than I ever have in my life, screaming that I’m sorry. He’s saying it’s okay but looks bad and I can tell he’s trying not to show how much pain he’s in. Then through his clenched face he starts laughing and pointing at my head.
I managed to somehow, without noticing before, during or after, to hit my forehead on the roll cage, causing an enormous goose egg to swell up. I reached up and touched it with wonder, so full of adrenaline I couldn’t even feel pain in that spot. Meanwhile Drew was going into shock and I had no idea what to do, so it was fortunate that some adults were driving past at that moment, saw us, and called 911. The ambulance and cops arrived shortly after. I was taken to the hospital by ambulance and released that night after a bunch of tests. Farrell was life flighted (yes, by helicopter) to the same hospital and was more beat up than I was but he was released the next day. We both recovered fully pretty quick (except for his physical therapy, which fixed the rest of his back problems).
So...the picture. The goose-egg photo. How did it get taken? Like this:
When the cops showed up, it was clear that Drew was injured worse than I was, because I was walking around and he couldn’t get out of the go-kart. So one of the cops, for whatever reason, told me to go sit in the back of his cruiser and wait. Like a good obedient idiot, I did. He wasn’t even in it. While I was sitting in the backseat of his cop car like some common criminal, I pulled out my LG Cosmos 3 slide phone and right there in the backseat I took a selfie with it. That’s the photo you see today.
Eventually my Cosmos 3 broke (I miss that phone so much. Those slide keyboards were elite. There was nothing like whipping it out, snapping it open, pounding away at the keyboard to send “hey how r u” to your friend six times a day, then slapping that motherfucker closed again), but the picture has survived the years to reappear every so often for a good laugh. Like I said, that was the first time we had ever hung out at his house. We agreed years later that it probably made us best friends. Going through something like that with someone brings you closer. Shared traumatic experiences forge bonds that are hard to explain unless you experienced the incident. He has given me shit, deservedly so, about riding in a car with me ever since. And six years later we’re still best of friends.
The only permanent damage I suffered that day wasn’t physical: since the crash, I have been unable to eat chocolate chip pancakes. Every time I see or smell them I recall how there were 7 of them in my stomach when I smashed a go-kart and my friend into a tree at high velocity. I just can’t eat them anymore.
Life, for whatever reason, is funny that way. And every time I see another fucking Geico commercial I feel a terrible urge to throw chocolate chip pancakes at the screen until it’s over.
The legendary LG Cosmos 3. You can buy one today for $29.99 on eBay. No, I’m not making that up.
