Now, try to imagine me in roughly that same outfit -- a white wifebeater -- but covered in blood and splayed out on the hood of a woman's Lexus, who just hit me while I was riding my bicycle through downtown Dallas. Keep that image in your head, we'll come back to it. Also, this was in the summer of 1998, so also picture me much sweatier and about 20 years younger. I know, I know, I'm asking a lot here!

I realize that smoothies are still around, but in the 90s, they were a relatively new phenomenon, a trendy new obsession. I'd work out at the gym for hours, then go across the street and get a "health" smoothie about the size of an oil drum. This was before we all figured out that these "health" smoothies contained roughly the same sugar and calorie count as if I just sat down and consumed an entire birthday cake by myself. We can play naive, but I doubt I'm the only person who recognized that the blood-red strawberry goop they ladled into every smoothie at Smoothie King looked suspiciously like what you'd see oozing down the side of a cheesecake slice. Was anyone really being fooled here?

Making a post-workout smoothie yourself, at your house, was another popular (and definitely much healthier) option, but that was problematic in the 90s as well. The nutrition in a Myoplex smoothie packet was spot-on, but the food science wasn't quite there yet to make them simultaneously enjoyable. Or even realistic.

If you followed the instructions on the back, and added the recommended amount of liquid, you'd end up with a concoction in your blender that was the consistency of a thick, lumpy, cake batter. Bottoms up! Not hardly, good luck even getting it out, so we all just routinely doubled the amount of liquid we added. Of course, that in turn meant that now you have more beverage than you could ever hope to take with you on the go, and I have so many memories from that era of me just standing in the kitchen, trying to gulp down glass after glass of my voluminous smoothie. Also, the consistency was the only similarity these smoothies had to cake batter, because the taste was absolutely atrocious. They tasted sort of like how vitamins smell -- kind of a mix of chemicals, dirt, yeast, and egg-farts.

I'd complain about it constantly, and so often people would say the same thing, "Why don't you try adding a banana?"

Noooooooooooo!! What an amateur thing to say! That is such a rookie move -- now it's just thicker and you have even more of it! More to stand in your kitchen and force yourself to drink! You just added 10 extra minutes of smoothie chewing. No bananas.

However, sometimes I would decide to treat myself to one of the deliciously Not-Healthy smoothies (with the strawberry goop in them) from Smoothie King. In order to have both the yummy taste and the desired amount of protein, my drink would always come in an enormous Styrofoam cup, about the same size as a Big Gulp.

Another thing we didn't yet have easy or widespread access to in the 90s were smart, technical, fabrics for exercising, so oftentimes, for sweaty activities, I just wore a trashy white WIFEBEATER. I had no car, so I would bike from the gym through downtown in my wifebeater to community college, all the while also holding my enormous strawberry smoothie. It was awkward, not to mention, dangerous. I was basically reduced to steering the bike with one hand, as in the other, there was always a ginormous smoothie the size of my face.

I had gotten pretty good at it though, which is why I was more shocked than hurt when a car peeled out of a parking garage unexpectedly and hit me at such an angle that I instantly flew headfirst onto the hood of the sedan. It was a white Lexus, and I will never forget the look on the driver's face, through her blood-splattered windshield, as I tilted my head up and saw her screaming at the top of her lungs. Her window was down, so I herd her shrill, loud, blood-curdling screams with absolutely clarity. I remember she was clearly crying, and I distinctly heard her say, "I've killed him!"

I could feel blood seeping through my shirt, but other than my wrist feeling sprained and a pain in my ribs where the handlebar probably jabbed me, I surprisingly wasn't in much pain. I have heard this is common. I was more concerned that I needed to help this hysterical woman behind the wheel, assuming she was somehow in much more pain than I was. All the commotion she was making certainly supported that. She just kept screaming and screaming and hyperventilating and incoherently yelling about how much blood there was.

And she was right, my blood was all over the hood of her car. The red stood out starkly against the white hood, and against my white tank top. But although I could see and feel all the freezing cold, wet, blood that was pooling up around my abdomen and staining my shirt, I still couldn't feel the appropriate amount of pain. I thought, maybe I'm in shock? The pain will probably kick in any second now.

But hold on, why is my blood freeing cold? Blood isn't freezing cold.

But a smoothie is.

My hand had instinctively clenched into a fist upon impact, trying to clutch the place where a handle break should have been, but instead finding only a Styrofoam cup. This had caused the smoothie to essentially explode all over myself and the car, instantaneously releasing its blood-red contents upon impact, much like a squib on a movie set. Dripping down her windshield, I could even see what might have been my brain matter or internal organs, but what was much more likely chunks of strawberry cheesecake topping.

By this time, quite a crowd had accumulated on the streets. It really did look like I had a massive torso injury and that my blood and guts were splattered all over this woman's car; plus, if that wasn't enough to turn heads, this elegantly dressed black woman's incessant screaming certainly was. (She really was hysterical).

I on the other hand was starting to realize I was going to be late to class, that I was extremely sticky, and was wondering if I'd had the sense to pack an extra shirt in my backpack. I don't know if it was because she noticed all the onlookers, or just because she didn't know what else to do, but this is where the story turns fun/bizarre: the hysterical woman got out of her car and gave me a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

What the f*ck?

I immediately began refusing to accept it -- telling her that the gesture was unnecessary and refusing to take it out of her impeccably manicured hands with my gross, wet sticky ones -- and I was probably going to say something about how these wifebeaters come in a pack of three for about two dollars. But she misinterpreted my reluctance, and quickly produced a second, crisp, one-hundred-dollar bill. Who carries tons of $100 bills around in their billfold?

I took them.

I still to this day struggle with whether it was the right thing to do, but $200 was almost two-thirds of my portion of the monthly rent at that point. I wouldn't have to wait tables for the rest of the week if I didn't feel like it. Also, the injuries I sustained did end up requiring some light medical attention later. The huge purple bruises that blotched up all over my skin were mostly superficial, and they looked worse than they felt, but my wrist did have to be put in one of those little splint-thingies for a while. Technically, with my wrist in that splint, I wasn't supposed to be riding my bike until it healed, but biking was how I got to the gym, work, and school. So of course, I biked anyways -- hell, biking with one useless hand was really no different than what I was doing already, every day with my ridiculous smoothie.

Which brings me to a point I didn't even know I was going to make until I started writing this, one that always now seems to weigh heavily on my mind in this new era of constant lawsuits and shameful, pseudo-legal, money-grabbing: at no point did it ever cross my mind to sue this lady.

Covington's Nursery seems to get sued every time someone trips on a pebble, or accidentally does something that makes them feel embarrassed (like stumbling on a pebble). COVINGTON'S is an 18-acre plant and tree nursery, and it is covered in millions of tiny pebbles; all just tiny accidents waiting to happen, just silently waiting for their chance to make someone tons and tons of money. The person just has to be willing to compromise their morals and sacrifice their decency and be willing to stretch out a lawsuit (that costs them nothing, unless won), until our insurance becomes fed up, and finally capitulates and pays them.

The word "accident" doesn't mean what it used to, but what happened with me on the bike I consider to be an accident in the old, traditional, sense of the word. The woman might not have been paying as much attention as she should have been, but she certainly wasn't intending to purposefully hurt me! And yes, I had some minor injuries, but I shouldn't have been trying to bike while also holding an enormous smoothie, like a moron. I still feel guilty even taking her 200 dollars.

However, in today’s time, I now realize that this would have played out very differently. I had multiple massive purple bruises that would have looked great in photographs for the jury. I later realized the frame of my bike was irrevocably bent and would have to be fixed if I intended to continue riding it. But furthermore, I had a wrist injury that I could have claimed prevented me from biking to work or school, even with a repaired bike, and that I needed her to buy me vehicular transportation to and from my job and school (even though I didn't have any such transportation prior to the accident). I also had a whole crowd of witnesses, who probably still think they saw something much more catastrophic than what they actually did. (I can't emphasize enough how much screaming there was...). I could have even claimed mental anguish (or something equally preposterous) from the entire ordeal.

Also, the fact that many witnesses observed this woman hand me money could easily be construed as her admittance of guilt and culpability for what happened. Why would she give that boy money if she wasn't to blame? In fact, with her fancy car and clothes, and passing out one-hundred-dollar bills from her purse, some people would have seen her as an easy mark, the perfect target for a lawsuit. Having now been on the other side of these lawsuits with our nursery, I know exactly how these things play out. I am even of the belief that there are some people who are so depraved, that they actually set out to create or at least encourage these lucrative "accidents" to happen.

However, there are just some instances when you recognize and accident for what it is and know in your heart that it would be wrong to completely destroy a person's life, at least financially, all because they failed to look left, right, then left again, before exiting a parking garage. It never even crossed my mind; because another thing I know in my heart to be true, is that if I hadn't been holding that smoothie, I could have most likely braked appropriately, and avoided this entire ordeal altogether.

The same applies with businesses-- should a business have to pay huge sums of money all because you weren't paying attention and tripped on a pebble? Does that feel right to you?

And as you can probably guess, every scenario usually involves a proverbial "smoothie" too, something that the "victim" could have been doing (or more likely, not been doing, like looking at their phone) that would have made them more equipped to deal with a dastardly stray pebble, if not simply avoid it all together.

I had intended to end this story with something vapid and cute -- like emphasizing how unexpectedly bad for your health a sugary strawberry smoothie from Smoothie King can be -- so I apologize that instead I took a left turn and decided to go on a diatribe about gratuitous and immoral lawsuits. But sometimes an accident is just that, an accident. No one should have to pay, because there was no malicious intent, and no one was really more at fault than anyone else.

Even while writing this, the thing that got me the most upset was not the collision, it was remembering those awful, awful, Myoplex smoothies.

I recall they were so thick, that sometimes if you tried to drink one too quickly, your throat would get backlogged, and you'd start choking and be unable to breath. I choked and coughed so hard once that it all spewed out of my mouth like a geyser, splattering all over the kitchen. I thought I found it all and immediately cleaned it all up, but then for months, I'd find dried Myoplex randomly on the walls. (Or the backsplash, or the fridge, or...)

It was hard like dried concrete or industrial spackle, and usually had to be scraped off with a knife. And now I'm wondering, is that what it did in my stomach? Oh gawd.

As a society we are going backwards in so many ways, but I am here to testify that insofar as the smoothie game goes, at least, we are presently so much further ahead of where we used to be. Go America, and remember, always look Left.

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You can read a different story about me in a wifebeater HERE. Try not to think about the fact that I have multiple wifebeater stories...