Socially Acceptable Ways to Kill Yourself

Full Contact Karate: Well… full-contact anything, for that matter. I tried this and found out that, even though the audience can’t hear that kick reverberate through my head, it’s an experience that I’ll never forget… although, if I’d been kicked a little harder I might have…

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Drinking Contests: Alcohol is a drug that you can overdose on. I question the soundness of testing the maximum amount that you can drink; plus, heroin addicts may not be particularly bright but I’ve yet to see a group of them injecting themselves every time every time they fail to bounce a quarter into a drinking glass…

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Filipino Food: That which does not kill you makes you stronger… except Filipino food which doesn’t kill you instantly but does make you hold your chest while you try to breathe. My favorite, on my visit to a Filipino restaurant, was pig fat cooked in pig fat. Sure, you’ll die at fifty, but you’ll have a glorious aftertaste in your mouth as you do…

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Base Jumping: Jumping off of a cliff with a parachute makes this “the most dangerous sport”. I see it as being like full-contact karate, except instead of a person, you are fighting the cliff face and gravity.

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Getting Drunk on the Railroad Tracks: For people who want to kill themselves but are too lazy to either do it themselves or to get a cop to kill them. Plus, trains are retro, so you’ll have that going for you. But, don’t worry about that. It’s sleepy time. So what if you give the train engineer a lifetime of nightmares.

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Bull-Riding: Whereas bull-fighting is based around the concept of avoiding the bull, bull-riding is all about staying as close to the bull as you can until you fall off and are trampled and then gored. If you stay on for seven or more seconds, you are a good bull-rider. The only other activity I know of where seven or more seconds is considered a long time is tasering oneself. With either activity, you aren’t going to want to get back up right away.

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OTC Drug Highs: We all knew kids in high school that we knew weren’t going to graduate or even survive due to their willingness to try to get high on stuff they heard about on the internet. Drinking a bottle of cough syrup, eating a mass of nutmeg… Whenever these kids told you about their weekend you involuntarily winced… but, at least you know how many antihistamines you have to take to require an emergency room visit and a catheter.

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Exotic Snakes: As a species, we went to a lot of trouble to create what we call “indoors” to segregate ourselves from venomous serpents. If you raise snakes inside your home, you are wasting five millennia of common sense. Yes, I know, there are a lot of dangerous things BESIDES super-venomous snakes to worry about in this world; but, few of those things trap you in your shower and then bite you until you die.

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Honesty: When outright honesty doesn’t get a person killed, it gets them beaten up pretty badly. It destroys marriages and even sends people to prison. Forget about registering guns… we should be registering people who tell the truth.

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Motorcycle Jumps: A good motorcycle jumper understands the physics of bodies in flight and understands exactly how fast to go and how his ramp should be constructed. But, the physics of what happens when you fall out of the sky on the other side of that jump is pretty much ignored until someone wakes you up in intensive care and asks you what happened.