John Phillip Bogulski & Tarrah Lee Curtis

Music is very important to me, as it is to most people. Anyone not moved by a song at some point in their life has something wrong with them. For the most part when I hear music, it feels me with a mood that can sometimes help me access my creative brain, which I am down for at literally any moment in time. However, there are few songs that are forever tied to a specific moment or time in my life. For the next 5 days, I am writing about 5 of the most memorable. I’m numbering them for clarity sake, but they are not ranked in order of importance. I’m just listing them in the chronological order the moments tied with the song occured in my life.

Anna Nalick – Breathe (2 AM)

The summer of 2006, I made a “Grey’s Anatomy” soundtrack. The early music on that show is fantastic, and this particular song was on it. So up until the events of this story, the song was just a song from “Grey’s Anatomy.” I had the CD playing when I had my first car accident. I’ve had a few accidents, but this was the only one (involving another moving vehicle) that was partly my fault. Insurance says all my fault, but you be the judge. (Or don’t. That’s not the point of this story.) It’s also the closest I have ever come to dying. First off, I was driving a 1990 Geo Prizm. And yes the car was old as fuck even at that point. It also weighed basically nothing and felt like it was made of paper. I didn’t drive it much on the highway because going that fast made it feel like the wind could push me across the highway. And this time it did (with some help from a truck). I was on my way down to Best Buy to buy a season of “Lois and Clark” on DVD. And yes, that was a weird thing to do even then. But as a fan of “Smallville” and “Desperate Housewives” I felt like I had to watch it. (It’s not a fantastic show, and definitely not worth almost dying over.) This was a pretty standard non-big city highway with 2 lanes going south, a ditch in between, and then 2 lanes going north. I was going south, driving in the right lane of the two lanes behind a painfully slow car. I went to switch into the left lane. I know for a fact that I did my due diligence and put my signal on and checked my mirror to see if it was safe. But by the time I switched lanes, the guy behind me had already transferred to the left lane. He going way faster than me (too fast to see that I had my blinker on apparently) so by the time I went to switch, my car hit the entire side of his pickup truck. The force of hitting a vehicle that could have eaten mine for breakfast threw my car into the ditch. It didn’t flip, more just a horizontal shove. But I did not stop in the ditch. The car kept on going out of the ditch right into the northbound traffic. Through all of this, I was spinning constantly and could not get control of the vehicle. Luckily, there were only 2 cars in the immediate vicinity on the northbound side, and they avoided me. And I was quickly able to gain control and get immediately back into the ditch. During this whole time, “Breathe (2 AM)” was playing. Never in my life has a song been playing in a way that felt like it was placed by a soundtrack producer to perfectly orchestrate the moment… except for this. The car hit just when the chorus started. And it has a very “Oh God, I might die, but let’s slow things down to reflect on that fact” vibe to it. But I somehow ended up perfectly fine, the car just slightly scrapped with one flat tire. I was definitely lucky as fuck, but I also think the song might have saved my life. It kept me oddly calm, which allowed me to gain control of my car. So I’m slightly grateful to the song, but also traumatized by it. And to be honest, it was one of my least favorite songs on the CD, but I learned it’s a great car wreck song. And since I’m alive and well, I’ll say it. It was fucking cool.