Tom

I have known Tom for about 15 years and we used to hang out all the time. We would get together with a bunch of our friends and play Warhammer 40k or D&D (STFU and keep reading!) while drinking Coke and eating McD’s cheeseburgers. Remember when they were 39 cents each on Wednesday? Yeah! That was amazing for us then.

Anyway, over the years, we naturally spent less and less time as the group of friends we once were, but a few of us still stay in touch via email or whatever. Tom is the only one, who really has spent much time with me over the last few years. Although I still value the other guys, they are busy living their lives too, so I can wait. Tom stayed local for the most part and my oldest son calls him “Uncle Tom” which is a pretty badass title to be someone’s uncle and not be blood.

Well, we had a beer tasting a few weeks back and I never heard from old bald-ass and I was being pissy about it. The beer tasting came and went and finally I heard from him; he was all doped up on pain meds after having been in a pretty bad truck accident. Black ice into the median basically sums it up.

In a nutshell, Tom was sick of never having broke a bone, so he thought it would be great timing. Hit icy roads in the afternoon, careen into the median of I-90 in a full-size Chevy truck and not have the airbags deploy. His left leg was twisted all over the driver’s footwell and ended up being broken in several places. He then crawled from the truck onto the pavement in the twenty-something degree weather waiting for help to arrive.

Luckily for Tom, help did come and he did get treated. The cost of the hospital stay, treatment and ambulance ride (What a little pussy, he should have walked) are somewhere along the lines of the difference between his yearly wage and mine…. Basically, Tom has to live like poor man Jack for a bit to pay off those pins, plates and screws in his leg. They are pretty gnarly though.

This all happened the second week of December and I was happy to have spent the last couple days hanging out with him. We had dinner the 30^th, he came over to celebrate New Year’s Eve and then we went to brew some beer on New Year’s Day. All in all, it was substantially better than the previous few weeks. He has been going mad sleeping at his parents’ house and reading books drinking smuggled in whisky and vitamin water.

I tried to convince him to write a guest post about his hospital experience and the trippy ass dreams he had on all the pain meds. The ghost cat under the bed sheets was an especially interesting part of the story. We will see if he comes through with that or not. Anyway, here is a pic of Tom with the only facial hair I’ve ever seen on him. Give him a red hat and yellow ear muffs and he could be Yukon Cornelius from “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.