A Blasphemous Account of My June 17th “Accident”

Out to Pastoral

By John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—11/7/11—I follow the lead of Greek playwrights, unknown authors of Medieval mystery plays, and dramatists and other writers of the Renaissance and modern period by putting words into the mouth of God in the following essay.

Really, as you’ll see, I have no other choice if I’m to understand why a woman of 92 winters slammed into the rear of my 1996 Chevrolet S10 (standard cab), making me a victim of whiplash and the patient of an array of doctors and therapists.

As a child growing up in a Fundamentalist home—Southern Baptist and Jehovah’s Witness, if you can countenance that combination—I was taught the customary articles of faith, one of which was predestination.

From the very beginning, God had known what I would be and become. In short, everything happening to me throughout life had been set in motion the very instant God conceived the multiverse and everyone in it. From that plan, there could be no escape, no deviation.

Among the billions of other tasks confronting him on that day of creating every human to be—plus those other forms of life that he had to attend to, such as creating the bacteria that would bring on the Bubonic Plague, the pandemic of 1918, and the HIV/AIDS of our own era—he multitasked and laid out a plan for me and a speeding, reckless granny on South Church Street in Burlington to collide.

He must have mused, instantaneously if not more swiftly, considering the enormous expenditure of energy creating a multiverse still rapidly expanding, “I will have John L. Idol, Jr., nearing his 79^th birthday, struck by an elderly woman (whom I hesitate to name out of sympathy for her gerontological challenges) punished for daring to become a secular humanist, and deal him a blow removing him from his comfort zone as he tries to overcome the existential angst of redefining himself.

I’ll use the wreck to undermine his cocky belief that he’s master of his own fate rather than an object lesson for anyone foolish enough to believe that I will brook the existence of agnostics.

“I’ll prepare him to take gleeful pride in coming across a poem by Emily Dickinson which pokes shy fun at an Amherst preacher who, in attempting to comprehend my enormity, ending up by ‘arguing [me] narrow.’ John-Boy, as I prefer to call him, will put that line in the context of astronomical findings showing my multiverse still expanding with speed faster than light. (Ah, what pleasure I take in having curious people find out things that even Einstein won’t know.) John-Boy will fancy himself a fan of astronomy and a delighted admirer of the Hubble telescope’s peering into my business.

“I’ll arrange things so that he’ll get his head out of the clouds and settle down to rehabilitating his noggin and back. He won’t like undergoing MRIs. X-Rays, and CAT scans; he’ll scoff at advice to see a chiropractor or expert in acupuncture; and he’ll resist his primary physician’s attempt to treat his problem as psychosomatic. ‘No shrink for me or mind-altering drugs,’ he’ll stammer, even if his pain is driving him practically nuts. Pardon my use of slang, for sometimes I forget to be as elegant as I will be in the King James Version of the bible.

“He’ll delude himself into believing I’ve gifted him as a writer. Sad to say, but he’ll be one of those hacks, for I know that the world will accommodate only a few great ones and have doomed John-Boy to hackdom, a condition painfully apparent in a journal of the accident that he’ll keep.

“I know precisely what he’ll write, long before it’s written, and thus take the liberty of sharing a couple of passages:

July 9: The most miserable day I’ve had since my accident: general pain in all my body, even in my hands and fingers, with feelings of lassitude and worthlessness, since I can’t get on with my writing. The pain causes me to lose concentration and focus. Forced myself to begin a column for WeeklyHubris. Appreciate fully the irony inherent in our journal’s name.

October 9: Much less pain today, none in lower back, much decreased in neck and shoulder. Dr. Noorani told me she was much concerned about my psychological condition after reading portions of this journal. That concern led her to seek out a Shrink here in Burlington further to help me. I suppose my entry expressing my belief that my life essentially ended on June 17, the day a speeding Granny rear-ended me, alarmed her. A word of explanation is in order. I didn’t mean to imply that I was among the walking dead. Far from it. I meant that the life I was now living had been radically changed. All those visits for physical therapy, those pills such as Celebrex and Mirtazapine, and those trips to see doctors pulled me away from reading and writing and transformed me into a kind of pawn, because I was no longer master of my own time and schedule. The issue was, and is, an existential one, for I’ve had to redefine myself, and I damn well loath the role of pawn . . . especially one rear-ended by a Knight, who’s not supposed to travel the board that way.

Enter God, Stage Right, again:

“I have billions of other lives to plan and a multiverse rushing out to who knows where. So, I’ll take leave of John-Boy and let him search out my reason for having his head practically knocked off his shoulders. I’m certain he has the gumption to stand up one day and say to John Calvin and all those predestinarians in his camp, ‘You’re full of crap.’ NB: That vulgarity is John-Boy’s, not mine.

“Finally, I’m grateful that John-Boy fell in step with Greek dramatists and other writers in allowing me to share a portion of the script I wrote for him. And, by the way, I’m thankful, as well, to have created WeeklyHubris to spread his words and mine to a wider audience.”