The Not Funny Post

Dear Lucky Anonymous People That Drove By Us On the Shediac Road,

I want you to immediately go to the nearest corner store or gas station and purchase lottery tickets for all of the draws this week. Lotto Max, 6/49, Atlantic, don't forget to get Tag. Buy some Crosswords and Set For Life and any other scratch tickets you can get your hands on. Today is your lucky day.

It occurs to me that you are probably under the legal age to buy tickets. If that's the case, take a moment to consider that today is your turning point. Today is the day that despite all the poor decisions that you've made in your short life, the universe has handed you a chance to turn it all around.

I hope that you remember us. I hope that you remember the moment that you saw a family walking on the sidewalk along the Shediac Road, and decided that you needed to do something to impress your friends. I hope that we weren't just some random synapse in your brain, and that you carry this moment with you for years to come. Because, as I said, today is your lucky day.

I imagine that you probably just came back from the beach, where you maybe had a few drinks, and you just happened to have a bag of chocolate chip cookies. Maybe you'd been munching on them all the way back from Shediac, and you had just said "Ugh, if I eat one more cookie, I'm going to throw up". But you had one last cookie in your hand. What to do? You couldn't eat it - if you did, your friends would probably make fun of you. That would be awful, wouldn't it?

Or maybe you were fighting with your friend over who got to eat the cookie, and in your struggles, you ended up losing the cookie. Or it was your friends that were fighting over the cookie and you'd had enough of their bickering.

Perhaps you had just had a really bad day, and in your whole life, nobody had said to you "when you're having a bad day, don't take it out on other people".

Or, saddest of all, maybe you saw a family out for a walk and you said to your friends "Watch this."

Whatever the case, the cookie that you threw didn't hit me, and it didn't hit my wife. But it did hit my infant daughter. And you know what? It doesn't matter that it was just a cookie. Because you threw something from a car on the Shediac Road - where everyone does at least 60 km/h - and YOU HIT MY DAUGHTER IN THE HEAD.

And here is where today is your lucky day. You didn't hit my child in the face. You didn't take out one, or both, of her eyes. You didn't scar her for life. You didn't hit her in the temple and give her brain damage or kill her. And before you shrug that off, I want you to really think about what it would have meant if you had actually killed my child. Can you even imagine what that means? Can you imagine if you had killed someone and just kept on driving?

We couldn't tell which of the cars speeding past you were in. I assume that you were in the car blasting the rap music with the windows down, but that's just an assumption. We have no proof, and we have literally no way of tracking you down. You got away with the perfect crime. Bravo. It could have been so much worse. My daughter suffered nothing more than a small bump and a big scare. Her amazing mother is doing everything exactly right to keep her on schedule and to keep her father from being a crazy man.

So instead of taking my anger and lashing out at you, the best I can do is post this on facebook and ask people to share it around. If the whole six degrees of separation thing works, and enough people share this, you will eventually see it.

I know this was a long post, but I'd like to think that it found you. I would like to think that when you read this, you get nauseous realizing how close you came to destroying everything beautiful and wonderful and amazing in my life. And I hope that the next time you find yourself in a situation where you could do good or you could do harm that you make the right choice.

Because the next time, you might not be lucky. And neither will someone else.

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