I was in about, say, half a dozen car accidents (both as driver as well as a passenger once or twice), dozen or two near catastrophic misses (most of them involving hazardous driving on utterly crappy roads and were, once again, mostly about me managing not to fly off the road in the last possible second). It was never my fault - and this part is what I hardly believe myself. On the other side, the catastrophic misses were partially my fault (young and restless, driving mostly empty roads, more like a rally run) as well as fault of other drivers and/or horrible roads I was driving on. I simply used to spend a lot of time on wheels, as the job demanded.
On the absolutely positive side, I was never hurt in all those accidents that always ended with only material damage for all parties involved.
As a funny side note, my first cousin was a true maniac on wheels. Living in a territory that could best be described as some sort of "wild west", he tended to race like mad. If the track from A to B would require a normal person driving with a bit of a "punch" take 20 minutes, he wouldn't rest until he would manage to make the track within 15 minutes. Then he'd aim for 14 minutes, then 13 and so on. He has about one dozen fully documented occasions where he literally flew off the damn road, totalling the car. Yes, that includes wheel barrels, somersaults and/or any acrobatic movement a car flying through the air is capable off producing. Those dozen heavy accidents resulting in total losses of a car were, if I am to believe his closest friends, actually more like two dozens of those he had and that escaped our attention because he happened to have them far away from home and nobody caught wind. Most of the cars he wrecked actually belonged to his friends and our mutual relatives. No, he never got to drive my car. Guess why.
The guy never, ever got hurt, except for some cuts and bruises. When I asked him what his secret was, he said, believe it or not, "never put on the seatbelt". "See, this is what happens", he told me in a bar, leaning in his James Dean "I-am-too-sexy-for-this-world-manner" and smoking his Marlboro. "I fly off the road, car hits the ground, I fly out - either through passenger window or through the front window - in one direction, car tumbles off in another. So we go our separate ways. If I had worn the belt half the times I was driving, I'd be dead ten times by now."
Please, feel free not to take heed to this advice. You are not driving a rally.
On the bright side, my cousin eventually got married, got two kids and calmed down to the point where you couldn't recognize him as the blood-boiling teenager and feisty adolescent ready to pick a fight with a freight train if possible in any way or form.
Ah, the fun memories...
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