Post-Modern Drunk: Death and the Drunkard
Like most people, I'm afraid of death, of being forgotten, of simply not existing anymore. This is not something that consumes me on a daily basis; I certainly act like I'm more or less immortal. Mostly, I just worry about dying stupidly--when you die in a particularly boneheaded fashion, you run the risk of being posthumously saddled with a nickname completely beyond your control: your identity could be completely overwritten by a bad death.

As bad as, say, emphysema or cirrhosis of the liver may be, at least they wouldn't detract from who I am. To die from either or both would certainly not be pleasant, but for me it'd be entirely apropos. No twist ending, there. Likely, the most appropriate ending for me would involve choking on bourbon as I was trying to drink it through the tracheotomy hole in my throat.

But for some crazy confluence of events to take me out and transform me from Stu--"cranky keg of wasted potential"--into Stu--"that blender mishap guy"--would just be tragic.

Once you go out in a freak accident, people start every conversation about you with: "So there we were, in Avignon, me and my friend Stu...actually, it was a terrible tragedy what eventually happened to him. He wound up being electrocuted when his upstairs neighbor lost control of her vibrator and it fell two stories, ricocheting into the bath he was taking. Anyway, Stu and I were lost in Avignon trying to find an open liquor store..."

And that's how your memory lives on.

• Fifth victim of the happyrobot Strangler.
  
• Stu, of the Anal Bead Snafu.
  
• "Remember that Richard Gere hamster legend. Well, I knew this guy..."

It's one thing to earn a Darwin Award due to your own stupidity. If this happens to me, I'll accept my fate and move on to the next plane with only a little grumbling. But if my own stupidity ends me in a way that gets a new idiotic warning label attached to something ("Enriched plutonium is not a toy and should not be consumed in anyway"), I'm going to be pissed.

Kismet and I will have to have words.

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