When the guy behind the counter calls your number, what’s it going to be? A heart attack? Standing too close to the cactus when the scorpions inside burst out? Plain ol’ old age? Sliced to bits when a display of kitchen knives falls over at the department store?
I’d prefer it to be old age–asleep in bed after reading a good book–but I suppose saving the world in a heroic, courageous and noble manner could work, too.
If all works out I’ll be going to work for a brewery in a couple of weeks. Crushed to death in several hundred pounds of barley? Maimed by a bottle capping machine? Accidentally brewed in a vat of Miller Highlife?
Not as glamorous as it sounds. I knew a guy who died like that. His girlfriend will never forget him dying in her arms. :eek: His wife was so furious, she didn’t want to have a funeral. His family finally talked her out of that. He might have thought it was a great way to go, but he left a lot of pain behind.
I’ve been a bus rider all my life. Years from now, after the world has changed and the seas have risen and the ice has melted and petro fuel has become too expensive for all but the ultra-rich in their private executive dirigibles, and we are driving our horse-drawn carriages through the new cities of Nunavut, I will be swivelling on my cane to watch a pretty woman walk by, and I will be hit… by the last operating motor bus in the world. That’s the kind of irony I’m talking abouit.
It’s going to be something really klutzy. I was just discussing the permanent bump I have on my forehead from bumping into things and falling on my face as a tiny one. I am very careful now but something spastic could happen and send me into the next world.
I don’t know exactly, but it’s gonna have something to do with that last stair step before the landing in my building that I always miss because of the funny shadow cast by the modern light fixture in that area.
Shot dead at age 97 by an ex-student with a death ray after they spent 50 years puzzling over what I wrote in their yearbook, only to discover that it was “How about them Dodgers?” in Latin.
Another weird one was the family traveling on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, when a tree fell onto their Volvo station wagon, killing the driver and front seat passenger and injuring the two boys in the back seat. (Traffic on the Merritt Parkway is normally at highway speeds, so what kind of freak coincidence had to occur for the tree to land directly on their car?)
I’d like to go out like the guy in that old joke; peacefully in my sleep, not screaming in terror like the passengers of the plane I’m piloting at the time.
I assume one day the cats will finally go through with the plan to kill me in my sleep, flee the house, and take over the world.
Barring that, probably lung cancer. Gotta quit, gotta quit…
Crushed to death by a cascade of rare, antique, and otherwise-precious books in my magnificent private library.
In reality I’ll be hit by a drunk driver on my bicycle. If somehow the drunks don’t get me before I can move away from this town, then a light rain will, because Santa Fe drivers inexplicably freak out whenever there’s the slightest hint of rain.
Gotta quit, gotta quit…