Three years ago, I very nearly died, and the man who very nearly killed me (whether in shock, or more likely saving his own skin) left the scene, as well as his almost conscious brother among the pieces of two shattered cars. A manhunt was launched. The man (who will be hereby called the Jerk-Off, or Jerk Off, or simply the Jerk) later turned himself in, and I can only assume that none of those reasons had anything to do with an overwhelming sense of guilt and more to do with the court date for driving with a suspended license the next day.

The ordeal left me bitter to say the least. I was angry for a long time; angry for the dumb shit who destroyed my car, angry at the lax response from my insurance  (of which I will vent about later), and angry at the moronic, inbred hick who crawled from the warmth of his sister’s bed and into a podunk, backwater bar with his brother-nephew to get shitfaced and ruin a few people’s lives. But I got over it. Eventually. Mostly. There’s parts of me that still get roiled, but pretty much up until now I’ve modulated my feelings towards pity.

Every once in awhile I take a moment to google him, just to see where he is in life, also schadenfreude. Mostly schadenfreude. Like some Dickensian ghost, Google shows me his life, and achievements and shortcomings, and shortcomings, and shortcomings. As a sidenote, everyone should be terrified with the amount of information available online. Especially the parts you didn’t intend to be on there, like the details of a family member’s death after they lost control of their car on the highway causing them to crash and die on impact, or the time you cruised by a stop sign in 1994 only to be pulled over and arrested for driving under a suspended license, or maybe even that time that your friends and family only bothered to collectively raise $20 for your bail on a funding website the fourth or fifth time you were arrested for driving under the influence and/or without a license. At this point it’s just surprising that an obit hasn’t popped up in the search results.

As far as lives go, he seems somewhere in between the guy who didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic and the other guy who was super duper sure it wouldn’t sink. Either way, he’s the dick that no one particularly likes and the boat is sinking. It would almost tug at your heartstrings until you realize that, short of people dying on him, all the hardships in his life occur on account of himself (unless someone else forced him to get drunk and run a few stops signs the first time 20 years ago).

A bit of me feel like he’s a charity case. I should throw a potluck dinner in his name and raise bail money for the inevitable felony he’ll commit in the foreseeable future. That is until I remember that the Jerk Off is, ostensibly, just a bad person. In the midst of our court proceedings, he manage to postpone his punishment by coming up with the flimsy defense that he was simply no where in that area during the time of the crash. There was no way he could be driving under the influence with a suspended license, no matter what testimony his brother, in the passenger seat gave that night (he was shitfaced after all). Soon after he was caught driving again. I’m sure it was for really good reasons though and he did nothing that would have grabbed attention from the local police.

Really I’m just doing this to vent. I’ve written about the Jerk Off before, but there are still some things that I just simply need to get out to leave this part of my story behind. Retrospectively his impact on my life was minuscule, mostly because, hey, I’m still alive. But for that brief moment three years ago, there was a possibility that that moment could have stayed with both of our families for the rest of their lives.

For the first few months after the crash, I convinced myself I didn’t hate him, which wasn’t true at all because I did quite a bit for a long while. I’ve had an epiphany since then. For so long I enforced upon myself a dichotomous position, limiting myself to either hating him, or pitying him, which couldn’t be further from reality, because I could do both.  His life sucks, perhaps because of a mistake he made years ago. Some good people get caught doing stupid stuff and pay for the consequences the rest of their lives, but on the other hand (i.e. in the case of the Jerk Off), the mistake is being made again and again with disregard to the law and the safety of people around him.