OP, great story! Glad you're OK and I'm surprised that the bike did not get any damage.

The "soft foam grabing into asphalt" story is just load of bull. 1st, most helmets have a layer of clean plastic on the outside and 2nd an unhelmeted head would grab the asphalt the same way and bounce less, since the layer of skin and connective tissue on the skull is just so thin in comparison to the foam of a helmet. In case your head would "bounce" back from the street you would anyway get a serious brain trauma.