The End of My BMX Career

Being male, there were many times throughout my first 10 years when my brain was just... out to lunch. It happens to the best of us. But the biggest brain shut down I ever experienced (even bigger than the time I learned just how funny 'man pain' is) once again involved me and my bike, but this time some concrete stairs as well. And instead of my down below ugly bits, it involved my head. I had this red Huffy like the one seen in the picture here, and it survived the fall fine. Unfortunately though, I'm not a bicycle. Now I can't fathom what was going through my mind when I attempted to ride my bike down the concrete stairs at the age of 9 (nor remember it, like many things I did before this incident), but it probably had to do with a vision of performing an awesome trick I'd seen, coupled with the thought "it looked so easy on TV," coupled with the kind of daring stupidity that being male and being 9 will do to you.

So without a functioning brain, or a helmet, I came to the edge of the staircase on my bike, a full six steps to the concrete path below, and decided to take the plunge. I backed up a few feet and then peddled toward the edge again, thinking only of how "totally rad" it was going to be, even if I had to deal with a couple mere "bumps" on the way down. A second later, and my front tire had left the top step. It bounced down one, skid to another, and sent the back of the bike up in the air and down on itself. I was thrown clear of the seat, and landed head first on the concrete after a brief tumble down the stairs myself, probably going full scorpion on the ground. In a another second's time, I made the passage from breathing to bleeding, and then to screaming, and my BMX career was over just like that. Not so awesome.

My mom happened to be in the garden and came running over. It was one of those times where the pain was so intense that I didn't even feel it for the first couple seconds, and then all of a sudden the real burn started setting in as blood just poured down my forehead. She picked my whole body off the ground and ran me inside to drop me in the kitchen sink, where she started spraying me with the sink hose as "squirts" of blood seeped out of my head. It may have been why I never learned the times tables, or why this site even exists, but there was definitely some head trauma going on...

Now I must have a very thick skull (well, duh!), because I didn't need stitches or anything more than a wrapping of towels and gauze for the rest of the day. It took years for the small "dent" in my forehead to heal up and even now there's a few ridges there. Luckily, my head was temporarily alright so I could continue to jeopardize it in the future to even more brain-dead stunts, which I did, but I actually did learn a valuable lesson here: It helps to keep the brain fully functioning at all times; and if you're going to ride your bike down a flight of concrete steps, trying to flaunt skills you don't yet have, at least wear a helmet! Trust me, this kind of pain isn't funny.