ok, maybe not a near death experience, but scary enough to make you glad to be alive.

so I'm coming home from class, about an hour ago (nighttime), drivin on the freeway, da da da, no biggie.. up ahead I see some break lights and I'm thinking there was an accident. get up, to see that there is some debris in the road, like bedding materials and stuff. it's not in my lane, so I let people get ahead of me that need to get out of that lane, etc. no biggie. keep driving, and maybe a mile later, my exit is coming up. I work my way to the right lane. suddenly there is a box spring mattress in my lane only a few hundred feet ahead of me. time slows down... I consider swerving, think better of it, knowing of all the stories about people swerving and ending up killing 16 people, etc. now, despite how slow motion this all seems I run out of time. I slam on my breaks... the guy behind me, luckily, sees this, and swerves to the shoulder lane (which is what I should have done, but ran out of time to do) I hit the box spring mattress with a sickening crunch by this time I've slowed down to about 30-ish... after I hit it, I pull over, wanting to check out my car, of course this is impossible with all the traffic, and other cars that are trying to swerve around this thing are honking at me because I'm in their way... I don't know what to do.. I get back in traffic, and get off at my exit a few hundred feet away. pull off to the closest parking lot to try and check out the damage. turns out that that plastic thing that sits under your bumpers was ripped off and hanging on by one bolt. other miscellaneous plastic stuff was broken down there too. and the bottom of my front bumper is all scraped up.

I'm lucky to have escaped with so little damage, and glad I didn't swerve into traffic and cause a 32 car pile-up. perhaps this wasn't the worst that could happen, but it scared me s***less