One night I dreamed I was going to die.
I fell into a bandit's trap and they were pointing a loaded submachine gun at me, ready to pull the trigger and settle my life. In that moment I was terrified, and I remembered the unfinished novels in storage, the memoirs that always started and went nowhere.
It was strange in that moment that it wasn't my father and mother I was thinking of, that the only thing I could think of was stealing those remnants of the scrolls before they separated me physically and mentally, scrambling to write an obituary, with a feverish climax, if possible, and a denouement ......
I didn't die in the dream, but I woke up extraordinarily afraid of death.
But people are bound to die.
Cody Cassidy (or possibly Paul Doherty) says that the risk of dying grows every day from the moment you are born, and that even if you are healthy and have no birth defects, there is still a 0.04:1,000 chance that you will die.That may seem like a small probability, but it's a lot more likely than hitting a super jackpot.
If I had the humor of Cody Cassidy (or possibly Paul Doherty), I'd add here that if you're still banking on winning the jackpot to change your life now, you should have a coffin for yourself first, just in case.
That is, if you're still alive, you're likely to die.
Put those words in the hands of a stranger (definitely not you and me!) ), who is likely to slip and fall because he stepped on a piece of fruit peel while walking, but instead of hitting his skull, he'll hit a hornet's nest, with the buzzing, industrious species chasing him so far that there's nowhere to hide and he'll have to leap into the ocean in order to avoid getting his face stung by the bees and turning it into a blackened color.
If he's lucky enough to swim to Niagara Falls, he might even run into Anne Edson Taylor, who's taking part in a barrel game.
Anne Edson Taylor was a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher who, in 1901, because of a private economic crisis, decided to become the first person to get into a barrel and roll over Niagara Falls because she thought it would make her famous and earn her money.
If he's unlucky, running into a random beast of the deep is a sad end. But I hope it's a great white shark he stumbles upon, because it's said that drowning is 100 times more likely to kill you than being bitten by a shark.
If he's good enough in the water, there's a 50/50 chance he'll stay alive, albeit probably as a disabled person. Perhaps he would have become an inspirational star, taking part in a world tour of speakers and printing books about his bizarre experience, thus spending the rest of his life in a different kind of spiritual intoxication.
But it's also possible that he'll be so devastated by his lover's proposed breakup that, on a dark and windy night, he'll decide to sneak aboard a spaceship to land on the moon, then jump out of the space station and dive headfirst into a black hole.
Guess what happens to him?
Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty will give you the answer in If You Jump Into a Black Hole.
This is a science book that is funny as hell, from the title to the interior to the notes. When Stephen King meets Stephen Hawking, when the horror novelist meets the titan of physics, you will have a marvelous sensory experience.
This book features forty-five bizarre ways to die, such as jumping into a black hole, being buried alive, or taking a bath in the world's coldest bathtub. The author explains each of these bizarre deaths with rigorous science and humor, some of them seemingly whimsical, some of them true, and some of them come from the personal experience (or autopsy report) of some brave people.
The authors make an interesting point: If you go and try one of these hypotheses - say, you eat the most toxic thing in the world, or you jump into a volcano - and your experience is a little different from what we've described, and in the worst case scenario, you don't even die, then we hereby sincerely apologize.
Write us a letter describing the description, and we'll fix it in the second edition of the book.
Also, on the fact of having to die of old age:
Once a person reaches the age of twenty-five, you have almost a million and a half hours to live. The authors propose counting every half hour after age twenty-five as a miniature life. Fortunately, this miniature life can be increased using good behaviors, such as exercising, eating fruits and vegetables, and going to bed early, for example.
Or of course it can be reduced, just by doing the opposite, if you want.
So remember to go to bed early yeah!