Near Death Experience. Err more near TO death experience?

Tonight, I went to my newly-branded fave show in Denver. I cant say that it's my fave comedy show because it is in fact storytelling. It does occasionally incorporate comedy but there is a difference in the room, the rapt attention, the chance that the audience gives the performer that just doesn't necessarily exist in the same way that it might in a comedy room.

No, in this room, the attention span is not moving from laugh to laugh but from thought to thought, word to word. There is a beautiful patience behind the suspense of the moment. It bites onto the most ancient form of communication and entertainment known by our species and rips into it with gusto, and...well, maybe I'm a sentimentalist. But if I could spend the rest of my life listening to fabulous storytellers, I might die happy.

Perhaps it was growing up in a home where storytelling was encouraged and reading was paramount. I dont know. But tonight the theme was near death experience, and it took my own mind to the experiences that I found myself the closest to death.

There was the night, last year, in my cousin's house, where in the midst of a deep sleep, I was awakened by what I thought was the hot breathe of a dog in my face. Upon coming to, I realized I was looking directly into the blank face of a faintly glowing green figure. On all fours. The hot breathe continued. I pinched the shit out of myself. And the figure turned to the ground and crawled its creepy fucking ass through the door of my room. Through it. Through the damned door.

You can think that I'm bullshitting you. I bullshit you not. I rolled over, hyperventilating. Called my mom super late night in hysterics. Forced myself to run out of the room. And slept my terrified ass on my cousin's couch in the upstairs living room. She had told me that I was "always welcome to sleep upstairs. No questions asked." I guess I should have asked some questions.

There was the day walking along the lakeside path of Camp Wayne. When, looking out onto the lake through the trees of the path, I saw a young man with his tanned back turned towards me. He was wearing blue swimming trunks. And he was walking on the water of the lake. Yeah. On it. I turned away. Looked at the concrete. Looked back through the trees. On he walked. I did it again. And the third time he was gone.

I had a hippie-ish camp director who would be down with the spiritual shit so I asked him if anyone had died in our lake, explaining the strange thing that I had seen. Yes, he said. Exactly 25 years that summer, a polish boy who worked in the kitchen on boys' side had gotten drunk and drowned in the lake. While swimming. In just his swimming trunks.

Fuck. This was like sixth sense shit, right?

And then there was the dream I had towards the end of my college career. I walked into a room. It was a concrete-type room and there were two chairs. I sat in one chair. My father walked in the other door and sat in the chair across from me. I gushed to him about my life, about graduating from college, and the dreams I had in front of me. The unknowns of my future. The hardships of my life, the triumphs, everything that I could think of to tell him. He gave me his advice, touted his own pride, and too soon the dream came to a close. It's the only dream I've had involving my dad that has been so clear, so vivid. This November, it will be eleven years since he died from cancer.

And there are many stories that I could say that I almost died. Falls from horses. Falling asleep at the wheel of my old truck. Joining corporate America much to the chagrin of my conscience. Infantile asthma. And just being a complete dumbass. There are people who have made mistakes, simple mistakes, that arent here today because of those. I've made complex mistakes and I've managed to walk out unscathed so far. I'm lucky, I guess.

And that's where I'm gonna leave it.