Top 5 Near Death Experiences
I've been thinking about this one for a good while now and its a very tough question to consider. I probably have no idea how close I've come to eating it bad enough to not make it back from the other side.

So let's see, top 5 closest calls.
1. The first and easiest to remember is when I was about 12 and thought that I could just adjust the location of an electrical outlet with a screwdriver. The shower of sparks and the newly reshaped tip of the screwdriver told me differently and now I don't mess around with electrical stuff at all.

2. My first extra-vehicular motorcycle accident. in Green Point, just outside of CapeTown, South Africa on New Year's Eve 1992 (or was it 93?). Heading home after work to get ready to go out and party with my co-workers and pals. Some old fool in his Nissan changes lanes from the slow lane into the fast lane and comes to a dead stop as he's about to make an illegal u-turn. I tanked into his rear bumper at about 30-35 miles per hour, nearly making it around him but not quite. I flew a good ten or fifteen feet, landing ass first and then ankles and then rest of body. My cycle was mangled and would never move again without power assist. I suffered some injuries like a permanently buggered knee and an extra ordinarily ugly, painful and nauseating bruise to my genital region. A square bruise from thigh to thigh with my soft bits in between, all purple, all swollen and all painful as hell.

3. The first and only time I've flipped a car I was in. And this time I was driving. On the way home from an all night party at a pal's where my quasi-girlfriend slept with a buddy of mine, I was pissed off and driving too fast, came around a corner where the road changed from dirt to paved, where the morning dew was slicker than hot teflon. And we ended up upside down in a swamp with my bicycle cushioning out final resting place. The bike was alright with a new stem. The car was screwed up but drivable and I drove it the rest of the summer even though the driver's side door was not fully closable and the sunroof was a spiderweb of smashed safety glass partially contained by duct tape.

4. More times than I can count, out on crazy mountain bike trails, going to fast, losing it and nearly plunging off of steep dropoffs that might not have killed me but I might have preferred death to the pain of rolling down several hundred feet of trailside into stumps, trees, rocks and other stuff.

5. And the fifth closest call to death? I suppose it might have been when I was on a back country expedition in Wyoming back in 1988. We were in teams of four and the group ahead of us was scouting a route down from a pass between some mountain peaks in the Wind River Mountain Range. One of the guys in the group ahead of us slipped while checking a potential route down from the pass, which was at least 1000 feet up. He tumbled and fell almost a third of the way down. By the time we got to him, he was severely fucked up, broken elbow, broken teeth, all the skin on his fingertips was gone and lots more. It was pretty gnarly but he was alive and perched on a four or five foot wide shelf above another drop of several hundred feet. If he'd not stopped where he did then he would almost certainly have died. Instead, the group leader and I ran some six miles or something to a trail head and organized a helicopter evac for him. Would I have slipped if I'd been where he was and looking over the edge? I don't know and can't ever know but that's about the closest I've come to death.

In the end, he was alright. Or he was when we saw him a week or so later after we'd finished our section and were back in town for a refit for the next section of the expedition.

I'm sure I'm overlooking some very serious close calls but these are the ones that come to me now. Never been mugged, never been jumped, never been caught up in a mob action or riot (though I've witnessed many of them from my window at the health club on the Foreshore in CapeTown as the elections were looming). And then there was the trip down the Fish River Canyon in Namibia. And more. Never been shot directly at though I've had bullets go by me plenty enough.

I'm just going to post this and maybe amend it later on as new ones come to me. Or, if any of you know of other circumstances that I'm omitting (likely due to mental block or bashing my head on the ground) then pass them along as well and I'll post them up.

Oh yeah, when I was about 6, I nearly sliced my wrist with a pair of scissors. The blade went almost all the way through my wrist, barely missing the vein or artery that suicides always go for. The scar I've got actually crosses the blue line at my wrist. It was the first time I ever saw my father freak out. And rightly so, I was bleeding like a stuck pig.