So I’m going to back up a bit. Back in September of ’17 we got some tense news. They found a cancerous tumor right on the pulmonary artery of my mom’s left lung. Doctors were pretty sure they could crush it, no worries. Every single treatment though, every moment where there was a ‘positive’ outcome or a ‘negative’ potential skewed negative. It went from ‘no problem’ to ‘we’re a little concerned’ to ‘I’m so sorry’ in about five months. At the same time as all this was going on, my department at UC was starting to come under budgetary scrutiny through a handful of higher-level personnel changes. The guy that promoted me into my director’s level position bailed and left the university and things were beginning to get more than a little weird.
Things went south faster than anticipated, and we lost her in July of ’18. It was devastating. I had taken some time off work so I was with her the last few weeks before it was over and stayed away for a couple weeks after to try and figure out how life works now. Hardest thing I’ve ever experienced.
When I got back to work in early August, everything was a little surreal, but the normality was helping. And then the next shoe dropped. I came into work one morning and wandered over to the office of my video production team to give them some good news about expectations for the upcoming year. I walked in on my boss and a couple of HR types having a heart-to-heart with one of my staff. The boss appeared startled that I was there and then uttered those wonderful words “I wish I had better news.”
Right then and there they eliminated our department for budget reasons. A couple days later they let another 8 folks go from IT management, and less than a month later they got rid of the entire educational team in the eLearning Center. It was a bit of a route. I was stunned and completely unsure what would happen next. At least we had a really solid severance package and it gave us all time to regroup. At this point I was already adjunct teaching in the couple-year-old film school UC started, so I went to my department head and told him what was up, hoping to get on full-time as they were needing folks anyways. He was pretty open and said it was absolutely a possibility, he just had to line up some ducks before he could pull that trigger and figured it would take a semester, maybe two. In the end, that turned out to take over a year after that guy was fired, I was told everything he had promised was a lie, and it was possible, but highly unlikely that job would ever arrive. More on that later.
I figured I could survive til then if I played my cards right and tried to look at the job loss as a ‘sabbatical’. Staff aren’t eligible for such things even though at that point I’d been there for close to 12 years, so I was able to throw rose-colored silver linings all over the place. It was a weirdly good feeling.
The next couple weeks were strange, coming in to teach on Monday and Tuesday nights, but other than that, that was it. What a change from ‘normal’! On one of those Tuesday nights, just before 8pm I left from teaching my “Making a Short Horror Film” class (waaaay too much fun!). There’s an odd K-shaped intersection at the corners of Taft, Torrence and Columbia Parkway. I was turning eastbound from Taft onto Columbia in the south lane when our light turned green. Suddenly car to my left stopped abruptly and I looked up to see a beat-up shitty old pickup truck barreling through his red light from Torrence.
The guy hit square on the left side of the bike. To this day I don’t know why my left leg didn’t get pinned – I -think- I pulled both left hand and left foot up off the bike, sorta superman-style when he hit me. The bike went down on it’s right side and I somersaulted forward (yes, helmet, golves, boots, etc. were being worn). I laid there for a second and forced myself to get up as quick as I could – I was laying their in the middle of a five-lane parkway. I managed to stand up just in time to see the fucker in the pickup take off down the road.
Long story short, a dude in a BMW chased him down and got his plate #, and in the end all that worked out as it needed to. I was somehow fine, just a little bruised, nothing a little time and some physical therapy for knotted up shoulder and neck muscles couldn’t fix. The bike, however, was totaled. At least that’s what the insurance company determined, it honestly didn’t look -that- bad, but the clutch lever and both foot pegs were snapped off, left turn signal and the headlight mount busted and there were scrapes on the frame.
The day I had to go and gather what few personal belongings I had on the bike was really depressing. It was uncomfortably cold and rainy, the junk yard was, well, a junk yard.
To make matters worse, the recent loss of my main gig and the end-result of the settlement meant that I couldn’t really justify the cost of a new bike, as badly as I wanted to.
Soooo. At that actual moment it’s safe to say my outlook on life was pretty high on the ‘well, this fucking sucks’ scale.