"Life's a whipround."

 

I was riding my quad on the busy streets and sidewalks of Santa Monica, doing my best to avoid the cops. My registration was expired by a few years, so in addition to driving an off-road vehicle on public roads, I was expecting to be nailed for the tags, or lack of them.

Naturally, my route took me right past the police station, so I had to do some fancy driving to get from point A to point B. I'm not sure what either of those points were, except that, perhaps, I was just trying to get home, and I weren't in Kansas no more. 

One obstacle, besides the police station, was the busy Main St. section of Hwy 1. The traffic was pretty brutal, and I couldn't zip across, nor could I merge gracefully with them and make the necessary turns to get on and off the highway. The only other way across was a stainless steel escalator foot bridge with no steps, possibly to make it wheelchair accessible.

 The moving floor of the escalator was too slick for my tires to get traction, however, and I kept finding myself at the bottom, despite my attempts to gun the engine and get a good run at it. It turns out I was using the down escalator, although I had similar results when I tried the correct one. Gravity and the slick surface conspired to keep sending me back down the slide.

I gave up on this method and decided to follow some guys on bicycles. If they could make it across the busy highway, so could I. So I fell in with them, and they led me across to a parking lot where some excavating equipment was being stored. One of the guys decided it would be fun to use one of the excavators as a carnival ride and was picking people up with the scoop and flinging them around like cat toys, dangling them and whipping them about like a mouse on the end of a string.

Over my objections, he picked me up with the pincer-like claw, and high up into the air I went. When I reached the top of the arc, he brought the arm down quickly, in a whip-like motion so that I experienced a moment or two of complete weightlessness as the whip changed direction and sent me hurtling toward the ground, still in the firm grip of the claw.

At the very second when I thought I'd go slamming into the ground, he reversed directions again and eased the controls back up, setting me on the ground as gentle as a kitten. I wanted to be furious, but the landing was so soft, I gave up the idea of protesting.

"Life's a whipround, and I've got the whip," he grinned, singing the Chumbawamba lyric.

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I know there was another dream sometime after this, but I was jerked back into this reality when I had a single word enter my consciousness: "Melanoma."