If you failed to read my last column, which would make you foolhardy, allow me to refresh. When I left you, I was standing at a Hyasota, Pa. junkyard with family members staring at my demolished ’67 GTO, when my 3-year-old nephew Derrick called me a “big dummy.”

And the boy was correct in his youthful, yet blunt assessment. Like Homer Simpson once said, “But Marge, the liquor drunkened me.” I had tried to navigate Tire Hill the previous night while drunk and in a blinding snowstorm with no windshield wipers. My odds for success were extremely low, and that’s why my bottom teeth were wired into place as we surveyed the wreckage.

In continuing my rollover rundown, I’m reminded that a majority of my memorable crashes were preceded by liquid consumption, of which I’m not in the least proud and reluctant to mention. I’m mindful that some readers have lost loved ones to drunk drivers, as I lost my Aunt Sarah when I was a kid and never really got to know her. Nonetheless, my columns are always full disclosure, warts, pimples and all.

In my defense, a few of my wrecks occurred while attempting to do everything right, such as the first one I recalled last week on my way to pick up a friend for our first day of a job when Dad’s Valiant suddenly hydroplaned on Tire Hill and I spun in wild circles until my forward progress was rudely halted by two parked semis.

Five years later, I was again on my way to work again at Coleman’s Manufacturing in Somerset, Pa., in another of the treacherous Pennsylvania snowstorms. While inching up Jennerstown Hill, my forward progress was halted again by a “whiteout” and a long line of vehicles in front of me who couldn’t negotiate the steep hill.

I told my co-worker, Danny Applegate in the passenger seat, “Looks like a good time to step out and knock the ice off my wipers,” when suddenly I was airborne for no apparent reason. The reason became apparent when I landed on my keester on the icy road, and I saw the front wheels of a schoolbus spinning forward in the direction of my head. The driver had been trying to maintain his hill speed while blinded to the fact my Dodge Dart wasn’t moving.

Quick like a cat, I put my hands out just in time to push away from his front wheels, but the old Dart and the can of Copenhagen in my back pocket were both badly crumpled, and I spent a few hours in hospital with a sore neck. It was yet another Blough vehicle for the another local junkyard, which I was rapidly filling in a five-year span.

So two of the three wrecks I’ve recounted so far occurred when I was dead sober, first thing in the morning while driving to work. What does this tell us? Am I suggesting one should stay inebriated, sleep as late as possible and avoid any kind of work? Indeed not; any such suggestion was inadvertent, but I can’t prevent you from doing the math.

Ah, but in plowing ahead, those numbers start to change with other wrecks I recount in no particular order. My old nemesis, Tire Hill, enters the equation again, and again in an old, red, Plymouth Valiant convertible with my buddy Frank McVicker riding shotgun. Since he, I and Pabst Blue Ribbon we were just leisurely cruising with nowhere really to go that evening, we re-routed to “Old Tire Hill Road,” which was a couple hundred yards above the new one.

I don’t quite recall what Frank — my brother-in-law’s Skip’s wild brother and my riding buddy when I demolished my Harley Davidson years earlier — was showing me that captured my attention. But when I heard, “Doug, look out!” my attention returned to the road, which I had now run out of and was sliding over the edge of the cliff-like drop, which in most cases would mean sure death.

Even Frank admits to this day the Lord must have been with us, but as my dad used to say, “He better ride with somebody else; you’re gonna get him killed!” All seriousness aside though, the passenger wheels of the Valiant were just lifting off the ground to begin our bloody descent when we were halted by a downed tree resting off the ground, propped against a second one.

Sensing the seriousness of the situation, we laughed uproariously, assessing how we’d exit with Frank’s 225 pounds on top of me while upside down. Somehow we managed to climb out the passenger door while salvaging a six-pack from the back seat. We drank four of them on the walk to Pete’s Tavern, where we continued our revelry.

The next day, I was again the big dummy watching a winch truck spend an expensive hour extricating my Valiant. I think that one ended up at Honkus’ Junkyard.

Again, space restraints restrain me from any more sickening details of memorable crashes. Thankfully I now have the good sense to never drink and drive and never drive to work early. And God still rides with me, but he certainly buckles up.