The apple-cinnamon Krispie Kreme donut I’m eating while typing these words is not being consumed due to hunger or because of a needy sweet tooth unrestrained by weak will. Rather, that donut is digesting because its calories should assist my desire to leave this world in a somewhat more dignified fashion than a New Port Richey, Florida, woman.

According to an AP article, the 38-year-old woman returned home, greeted her mother, then disappeared. Police were contacted and a search conducted, but it wasn’t until two weeks later that relatives found her wedged upside-down behind a bookcase right there in her room.

It’s believed that woman, just 5-foot-3 and barely 100 pounds, fell headfirst into the space behind the 6 foot tall bookcase, then couldn’t get out.

So I’m eliciting the assistance of that donut—and perhaps one or two of its companions—to make certain I’m incapable of being so thin I could meet a similar fate.

It’s already extremely unlikely, but one can never be too careful, I say.

Apparently, thinking about the manner in which we’ll meet our eventual demise is considered a normal, natural part of growing older, so not only have I found an excuse for downing donuts, but I’ve found one for obsessing on morbid exits as well.

For a while now I’ve been following the Darwin Awards, which are given to honor those whose enterprising demises “improve the species by accidentally removing themselves from it.”

(Their mottos include, “Chlorinating the gene pool,” “Population Control Volunteers,” and “Evolution in Action.”)

My new goal in life is to eventually manage to leave it without making their list.

A visit to their website (darwinawards.com) revealed a West Virginian is in the running for 2007 “honors.”

Although the nomination details are still unconfirmed, the story goes that the West Virginia man was dismantling a dilapidated barn in mid-January of this year when he decided a chainsaw would speed up the process. Unfortunately, the posts he chose to slice through were the same ones that supported the roof under which he was standing. Gravity, one. W.Va. man, zero. (The site notes that as a consolation prize, the deceased did successfully manage to demolish the barn.)

Other site “favorites” (up for vote) include a 1998 winner who was sliding down a ski run on a protective foam pad he had stolen from around the leg of a lift tower when he crashed into a lift tower and died. The tower he crashed into? Yep. It was the one from which he’d stolen the pad. Seems like there’s a moral in that story somewhere.

A surprisingly large number of Darwin Award nominees are people crushed to death beneath vending machines while trying to shake loose a free soda (leading one poster to comment that “Guns don’t kill people, Coke machines do.”)

A lawyer representing a client on trial for murder claimed the victim had drawn his gun in a way that caused it to fire, thus killing himself. To prove his argument, the lawyer chose to demonstrate the victim’s method of drawing a gun, using the gun in evidence as his “prop.”  Without first checking to make certain it wasn’t loaded. The gun went off. The lawyer lost his life, although he did prove his case.

In 2005, a 55-year-old Croation man decided to make a tool to clean his own chimney, which was too high for a simple broom to work. He decided to attach a brush to a chain, then weigh it down with something heavy enough to pull it through. The man was in the process of welding the something heavy he’d chosen—a hand grenade—when surprise!

It exploded. I guess you could say he made an ash of himself.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.