Hey yo people, what's the 411? Well, nothing much to talk about today, except I'm slowly recovering from the sorry state I was in after my worst bicycle crash of all time; this occurred Monday evening (or do I call it night?). There I was, happily speeding with my bike along the silent streets of Ransome Kuti road, UNILAG. In my mind, I was effortlessly outrunning all the engine-powered cars with whom I shared the narrow road. Of course, this was possible only because the road in the streets of the residential area of campus had been fitted with speed bumps at almost every 5 metres interval. For this reason, the automobiles had to be run at low capacity. Thus, being on a bike naturally gave me great speed advantage over the cars on the bumpy roads. Unaware of a bump ahead of my direction, I continued at my happy speed, and even accelerated, till I blindly sped into the bump. No! My 20-20 vision couldn't have failed me; it never does. The darkness of the streets couldn't have been successful in tricking my flawless eyes into believing that it was safe to continue without decelerating, could it?
Up into the air, then down towards the ground went my bicycle; up, then down, I, its master also followed. As my bicycle fell, it kept moving on along the rough tarred roads of UNILAG, due to the high speed at which it met the unanticipated obstacle. On meeting the ground, the most forward parts of my body, in conjunction with the ground, formed an alternative braking system for the bicycle, and almost instantly, horse and rider came to a stand still. All these (from accident initiation to halt) took place within three seconds.
I arose from the ground as fast as I could, in pain of course, and continued my solo trip round campus. I had to do that because I didn't want to attract any unnecessary attention from possible passers-by. I am a man; a strong African man! Paying minimal attention to the intense pain which had been awakened in the three parts of my body which had served an unnatural purpose in the course of my crash (can you guess what parts?), I pedalled as fast as I could in my sorry state, till I got to the front of my residential hall. There, I met with Deola, a female classmate who had told me earlier in the day that she was going to be coming for a ride on my 'keke'. I had my first dose of sympathies at that stage and of course, many more 'sorries' followed in due course, as I cheerfully related my story to as many people as I could. I don't want to believe however, that the motivation for sharing the story with so many people was the 'bright' prospect of being pitied; no, I just saw it as a good way to kick-start a healthy conversation with my listeners.
My bike was returned by Deola in about twenty minutes time. I received it in good state, wheeled it off to my custom parking space in Jaja hall, and securely parked it. Afterwards, I went to my room, got my soapbox and headed downstairs for a Dettol-cool bath. The bath was followed by minor first aid; painful as expected as I rubbed spirit-soaked cotton-wool against open wounds on my toes, knee and palm (can you imagine? Injury on the palm!!! It's not the first anyway). I really don't think anything worth mentioning came after this, but I surely settled to my ever faithful companion: Nokia BH-503, and through it, I must have listened to my favourite song of this period: Asa's Beautifully Imperfect OK OK. This track has had me play it to my ears, at least, sixty times, between early November (when I got the album) and these final days of 2010. In fact, my obsession with the song is part of the reasons I posted the lyrics on my blog; I realized, after a Google search, that I couldn't find them anywhere on the web, thus I was motivated to be a trail blazer.
Major lessons learnt from bicycle crash:
1) Don't let achievement get into your head, else, you just might find yourself crashing back down faster than you went up the ladder of success.
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Hope I get the inspiration to be productive soon; till then, you can go... read your school textbooks. Ciao...
