My friends. Sit yourselves down because what I'm about to write is going to be hard to believe.
For the last month, things have been a little awry in my world. Mostly little things, like "I thought I locked the car before I went to bed," and "who the hell is that guy dressed like a mime sitting across the street for hours?"
I've decided to publish the following story not because I want to feel the derision of this entire community as I'm offered reams of tin foil with which to make a hat.
I'm writing it because two weeks ago I got an undeniable, unignorable feeling that I was going to be the target of a fatal T-bone accident, and on Sunday I came mere feet from being in that accident.
When my tire got a leak in it, I discovered a free air hose down the street and it was promptly disabled. Have you ever taken a good look at those air hose nozzles? Steel and brass. Made to be run over. And it was deformed.
Then, on the night of July 1, I was driving down the left lane, leading a pack of cars on Broadway - as its name implies, it's a major, one way 4 lane road,. I came even with a police car in the furthest right lane, and decided to cut back about 20% on my speed at around 10th ave. 8th avenue is a one way, major cross street with a light. Just as I got to 8th ave, a car that had been slowly rolling up to the red light gunned it when I was 50 feet away and by the time I passed him, only about 10 feet away. None of the other cars were close enough to hit him, and if the police car wasn't turning right, he'd have been the T-bone. I didn't stick around to see what happened, but I doubt the cop let him go with a warning. I was absolutely, positively convinced that he tried to get hit by me.
Later that night, a car tailed my blind spot for nearly a mile, around an on-ramp until forced to merge.
The next morning I walked a couple blocks to the store to buy one item and in the time it took me to shop, a guitar player had set up about 50 feet from the store, and the song he was singing went like this (I kid you not)
We'll they'll F*#@ you in the morning,
and they'll F*#@ you at night
and they''ll F*#@ you in the darkness
and they'll F*#@ you in the light
maybe the exact rhymes were different, but the bulk of the lyrics was just that, 3 chords on and on about nothing, just a platform from which to yell F*#@ You! at the top of his lungs. And no, it was nothing like the Cee Lo Green song.
This isn't the first time that someone's targeted me (Deadheads, can you say "Bernie Brown?") so I know when I'm being F'd with. For all of the above listed compelling reasons, I wrote a note to my family and a handful of friends - published via FB on July 2 - recapping what I just wrote and saying the following
If I suddenly die in an "accident" or "random" incident, it was neither an accident nor was it random.
For the record, this is the first and only time I have written such a letter.
Then last Sunday night as I was lined up to go West on Colfax, behind a huge pickup truck the light turned green but I didn't go. I hung back, let a space cushion build up, and in that time I noticed a van coming up Kalamath, again from the left and it was perfectly timed to T-bone the truck,, or me if I hadn't held back. The van was going way too fast for the speed limit, in fact too fast to even stop where the road ended @ Speer. I laid on my horn but couldn't get the truck's attention.
There were 3 cops responding to a call at the entrance to Burger King which is South on Kalamath - so this driver had to have disregarded all the flashing police lights as he drove right past them on his way to running the red light at 50 mph.
I have to wonder how likely it would have been that he could have made the stop 1/2 block later at Speer. How many drivers are recklessly out of control going through downtown Denver, blowing by police cars with their lights flashing?
About 100 feet before the intersection, at the last second, (and the point where he could have seen me lagging 50 feet behind the truck), the driver of the van gunned it to avoid the accident and ended up getting T-boned by the massive pickup. The van rolled several times. It was a fatality for the other driver who got thrown from the vehicle before my eyes. His wife and kids appeared unharmed.
I reported these two near misses to my insurance investigator who doubtedly reported it to Corporate HQ.
Two poll questions. Will the investigators take this seriously, finding a connection between the two red light runners? How far does the rabbit hole go?