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With its combustible mix of alcohol and combustibles, the first half of July can be a scary time. If there is an afterlife, it’s a good bet that its waiting room is full of some extraordinarily disheveled people these days.
Take this unfortunate Petaluma man...
At the behest of swimmers below, 20-year-old Michael Hourigan apparently hurled himself off the four-story high Hacienda Bridge in Sonoma County and into the Russian River below. The police deadpan that alcohol may have been involved while the author of the linked article notes that leaping off the bridge is a “dangerous activity” that “carries fines up to $500” -- which will definitely scare off thrill-seekers more effectively than an entire article about a young man’s death.
Joining the river leaper is the modern-day Don Quixote who penetrated the defenses of a Livermore windmill only to trigger a power outage via his electrocution. Kenneth Bush may have been a homeless man looking for a warm place. He may have been looking to steal copper wire. Right now, we just don’t know. All we’re sure about is his final occupation: Conductor.
And yet for every bridge-diver or windmill attacker who naturally selects himself, there’s always someone who, inexplicably, escapes Darwin’s net.
Meet 36-year-old Oaklander Joshua Grover. Based on what newspaper you read and when you read it, Grover either severely burned himself with fireworks, severely burned himself with the Darwinian cocktail of indoor fireworks in the vicinity of a working meth lab or simply blew himself up with a plain and simple meth lab accident. Whatever the case, enjoy the land of the living, Mr. Grover! It looks like you’ll be here a while longer.
I can’t put a finger on exactly why so many people take an interest in exceedingly stupid deaths (and it’s not just you and me or else this wouldn’t exist). Perhaps it’s the ultimate fear: You will be judged and remembered not by the life you lived but the death you died.
Of course, aspiring to merely not die in a spectacularly stupid manner is hardly a life’s ambition. We can do better. As Jack Handey put it “I hope that after I die, people will say of me: ‘That guy sure owed me a lot of money.’” –-Joe Eskenazi
