Okay...so here’s a story for you. A true story, incase you were wondering, about how I almost died. No jokes here--just some good old fashioned truths about my brush with mortality. So...before we talk about the day my life almost ended, the day the Gods might have seen it fit to take my time here on Earth away, we should first start at the beginning, when I was a kid...when I was young I was way into skating: I wanted to skateboard all the time.

had shortboards, I had longboards, I was a skater. It was fun! It’s what I did, it’s who I was...but I grew up in a suburb in New Jersey, and our house was right on a busy street that cut through the neighborhoods. And when I say busy street, I mean, a busy street--the kind of street right in front of our lawn that has such a consistent hum of cars whizzing by that it was what put me to sleep at night.

SO, I’m out on my front driveway as a kid working on an ollie...I would roll up and down, back and forth, ollie, manual...the things I could do... Until one moment when I went a little too high on the board, lost my footing, came tumbling down to the ground, and the board went FLYING out from under me and landed in the middle of the busy Jersey suburban street...of which it was promptly run over, and well, snapped to pieces.