-I don’t believe in seatbelts. For good reason.
-Whoa. Really? That’s pretty bold. So tell me: why don’t you believe in seatbelts?
-Not wearing a seatbelt saved my life. Twice.
-Wait. What? Saved your life?!?
-Yeah. One night I was driving home. It was winter. Roads were terrible. Snow and lots of black ice. And I was, y’know, not exactly sober.
-Ok…
-And so I’m going around this corner, probably a little fast and I hit a patch of that black ice and suddenly I’m spinning and the brakes are doing nothing but making it worse and I slam fender-first into a telephone pole at who knows how many miles an hour.
-Oh geez. So the seatbelt…
-Well, because I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, I just… (does sweeping hand motion) flew through the windshield. Like a cannonball out of a cannon. Boom. Headfirst, right through the windshield, slid across the hood and onto the road. And because I was a little, uh, tipsy, my body was, like, loosey goose and that helped too, probably.
-So… how is that better than wearing a seatbelt?
-Oh right, so I’m laying there in the street with windshield glass around and I kinda come back into consciousness, and I look over and the wires on the telephone pole are undone and flopping wild and the electrical box thing is sparking and the flopping, sparking wires hit my truck and it’s buzzing and suddenly somehow the whole thing goes up in flames. WHOOSH.
- ….
-So, if I’d had that seatbelt on, I woulda been unconscious in my truck, strapped in like a prisoner, and I woulda died from electrocution or burned to death. Or both!
-That’s, uh, crazy.
-Saved my life. And that was just the first time. You won’t catch me dead in a seatbelt.
Precious. Was that guy Bubba from Swan Valley, Idaho?