I throw Love and Rockets into my car CD player and forward to the song So Alive, I wanted to hear it a few times so I put it on repeat, crank it up loud, and head off down the long desolate dark dirt road that should take me home on this cool March night in northern New Mexico. I had driven this 8 mile dirt road so many times I was confident going faster than most people might, and I was alone with no passengers, so I was hauling ass.
As I approached a bend in the road a coyote came up the embankment so quick and appeared right in my headlights for a split second before it disappeared just as quick, but it was apparently just enough to throw me off for a split second and the next thing I knew I was rolling over and over off the side of the road in my car, my magic Love and Rockets moment had morphed into the violent sounds of twisting steel and breaking glass.
When the car finally came to rest upside down I realized that while I was definitely shaken up and maybe had a few cuts and bruises I was conscious and alive and not feeling much pain, just my head from some wounds and cactus spines it had picked up as I rolled over them. The stereo was still playing full blast and the car was still running even though it was upside down and squished, I reached up to turn the car and the music off but I couldn’t move my arm, I tried the other arm, nothing there either, THE HORROR, I had broken my neck and was paralyzed from the neck down.
I kept thinking the car was going to catch fire and blow up, and the song So Alive kept playing over and over and over and over and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, it must have played 100 times at what now seemed to be an obnoxiously loud volume that I couldn’t turn down, it was getting annoying, but then again maybe that was the only thing keeping the coyotes from coming back around, I am sure they could smell my blood and sense my vulnerability, like a wounded animal with no options but to get recycled back into the food chain, tonight.
I was out there alone in the darkness, totally paralyzed, ironically listening to So Alive over and over, slipping in and out of consciousness, and contemplating my existence for quite a few hours when some sweet girl finally found me and called 911, she waited with me until they showed up and cut me out of the car with the jaws of life, they told my family I might not make it and put me on a $20k helicopter ride to hospital hell. But I did make it, I’m Alive, So Alive…
Me totally paralyzed in the Santa Fe hospital
Me totally paralyzed with my beautiful wife Marianne helping me make a phone call
Me, my friend Esther, my wife Marianne, and my daughter Lauren at the Santa Fe hospital
Me finally at home with my wheelchair and condom catheter lol
Me at home recovering
