Where the sidewalk ends

Today, I saw a punk-ass kid's life pass before his eyes. Apparently it wasn't that impressive.

Shall we start at the beginning?

My husband is sick. He's had this hacking cough since New Year's Eve. No other symptons, just the bad cough. The kind of cough where you're listening to it and going "Seriously, how are you not throwing up right now?" Until two nights ago where it really did make him throw up. LOVELY, I KNOW. We had been asleep for about a half hour and he started coughing, then he sat up and started hacking, and then there was a point where I swear puke came up and he choked it back down. And I was all GO TO THE BATHROOM AND PUKE. DO IT NOW. NOW. GO. STOP FIGHTING IT. GO. Mainly because I knew it would eventually happen and I would prefer not to see it. Puke makes me puke. It's bad. And if he kept fighting it, it was still going to happen, and it would happen all of a sudden, and he would have to make it around the bed first to get over to the bathroom door and that could be problematic in the dark and the next thing you know I'd be washing the sheets and steam-cleaning the carpet in the middle of the night because SOMEONE DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIS WIFE.

Then the same thing happened again last night, and I was like That's it, you're going to the doctor tomorrow morning. We were going to go to IHOP because it's ALL YOU CAN EAT PANCAKES TIME, Y'ALL, but sometimes, as an adult, you have to make sacrifices. This is one of those times.

We found an urgent care clinic close to home to take him to today. It's lovely to mix with Long Beach's finest, you know. And by finest I mean ghettoest.

Side note: there was a 10 year old girl in the waiting room reading one of the Twilight books. Aren't those a little age-inappropriate? I mean, come on, Bella's all like "Edward! Do me! Do me! Do me! Do me! If you don't do me I'm gonna jump off a cliff!" Or something like that.

Okay, so the official diagnosis is that Edgar has bronchitis. So the doc wrote him a prescription for a Z-Pack (also known as a gift from Jesus) and an extra-strength cough syrup. After running a bunch of errands after the doctor's office (since that's exactly what a sick person should be doing), we drove to the CVS near our apartment. We were stopped at a red light on a one way street, crossing a major, busy, two way street that also has a Blue Line track running down it.

Just as the stop light changed to green, out of the corner of my eye I saw this kid in a bright blue shirt darting across the sidewalk into the intersection on his skateboard, in an obviously misguided attempted to make it across the street before any of the cars started moving. The person in the right line and Edgar, driving in the second lane, saw him coming, and didn't even take his foot off the brake. But in the next lane over, there hadn't been anybody stopped at the light. There was a van that was still approaching the intersection, and since the light changed to green before he got there, he hadn't stopped and was already accelerating again. And there goes the kid. Right in front of the van. The kid managed to jump off his skateboard out from in front of the van. He might have even pushed off of the van, I don't really know.

The skateboard ended up under the front wheel on the passenger side of the van.

My heart nearly came up out of my mouth. We just sat there stunned, realizing that we had almost seen a child get killed in front of us. Because if that child hadn't jumped out of the way at the last second, he would have been dead.

And it would have been his own fault. The van had no way of seeing him, and the kid should not have been crossing the street. The street was five lanes wide at that point. The light was green. The van wasn't at the intersection when the light turned green. The van was in the center lane. He had no reason to think that there would be anyone in the intersection.

The kid DIDN'T EVEN CARE. He just came trotting back to get his skateboard, in front of all of those cars that were stopped at the green light going WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED, I'M SO DUMBFOUNDED I CAN'T EVEN MOVE FORWARD. He was more concerned about his skateboard than the fact that his brains were about two inches away from being splattered all over Long Beach Boulevard.

STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID.

My caps lock button may break by the time this post is over.

His behavior was absolutely unacceptable. The stupid little shit thought that he was invincible. He knew, HE KNEW (looks like it still works), that the light had changed before he came off the sidewalk. And yet he did it anyways.

What is wrong with this kid? What is wrong with all of the kids like him?

Things like that make me scared of what it will be like when I'm a parent. Will I be able to get through to my children about how precious life is? About how playing in traffic is definitely frowned upon? That VANS GOING AT FULL SPEED THROUGH AN INTERSECTION CAN KILL YOU SO KEEP YOUR ASS ON THE SIDEWALK?

I hope so.