1988 was probably one of those big mistakes. I'm still working on the scattered pieces of that blur... If it's the night I think it might have been, I was very lucky to get home in one piece that night. I was playing pool at a bar at least 60 miles from home, trying to sober up with coffee, not realizing one of my friends kept spiking it and I was getting more wasted. When the other friend started giggling, I figured it out, got upset and left, and yes, drove all the way home on snow and ice wasted out of my mind. About 15 miles from my house in the inky black oneish in the morning kind of solitude way out on the windiest road through hills and hollows you ever saw (that all my friends drove drunk I don't know how many times), I missed hitting a stray heifer standing just off the highway, surprised us both, and I remember thinking "I hope the guy back there (I could see other headlights) doesn't hit her." Made it home, crashed into bed, still pissed. Next day heard there was a guy driving home from work who hit a heifer full on in the middle of the night, totaled his pickup, broken collar bone, shattered arm, really messed up, and it wasn't because he'd been drinking. It was because my car spooked the heifer, and then she lunged into his pickup. That happened near a drop off that could've easily killed either one of us if we'd rolled our vehicles.
I've often wondered about the way events might've rolled out for him if I hadn't been through that stretch first, since my being there was on a drunken whim. Our drunk driving may not actually kill anyone, but we don't see the wave of consequences we stir up in the universe around us, do we? I definitely altered the course of that man's life and history just being a fluky blip on his experiential radar that night.
New Year's Eve Eve is also on a Friday this year. That's like having an extra Friday two weekends in a row. Please be careful and get home without breaking yourselves. I don't even know how I'm still here sometimes.
