Hmm? Oh. Naw, I don’t think so. My self-esteem is healthy enough, and I don’t think I have much chance of ending up in such a position; neither do I really think I deserve such a fate more than anyone else would. Except insofar as me laughing at something like that happening to another human might possibly make me more deserving of such a thing.
It’s more a fate-tempting kinda thing, along the lines of Muphry’s Law.
I’ve brought her up several times before, so I’ll once again wheel out the story of my great-great-great-aunt (or similar distant ancestor), a heavy-set woman who had the misfortune to visit a poorly-maintained outhouse. She broke through the seat, fell into the cesspit, and perished most unceremoniously. A horrible fate, no doubt, and a tragic one as well… but also absurd and undignified and scatalogically hilarious. The best any of us can hope for, since we all die eventually, is a “good” death, one that is relatively painless and peaceful and dignified and not horribly drawn-out or lonely… but few of us indeed can guarantee ourselves such a fate, and if we look around we’re reminded of that uncomfortable fact every day.
I don’t remember the details of Great Aunt Mildred’s fate (and many of them I was never told in the first place; it happened before 1920), so even though I was told she drowned I’d say it’s equally likely she broke her neck on the way down and died relatively instantly. But even though it’s arguably better to die quickly of a broken neck than to spend a few minutes struggling to breathe with your face submerged in human waste, the key thing is that nobody wants to be remembered for dying in a cesspit at all. A century later, nobody in my family so much as remembers her name anymore (my mom did, but she herself died peacefully in her bed in 2013), but we all remember the more unusual circumstance of her death and the utter lack of dignity that surrounded it.
Laughing at such things is a pretty normal, human reaction to such horror. The gender of the outhouse victim doesn’t matter so much to me; it was far removed from me in time, and the circumstance is unusual and grotesque enough that it would be horribly hilarious and unthinkably revolting no matter whom it happened to. The guys falling off the balance beam was a different situation: fourteen old white men, looking for all the world like they’re on vacation, very possibly masters of their domains, conceivably approaching the ends of fairly successful and happy lives, climbing on board that log like gleeful eight-year-olds to show their mastery over the physical realm… and then toppling like God’s own finger flicking flies off His french fries. Funny in a hubristic-downfall kinda way. The comedy wouldn’t have seemed nearly as rich had we seen a line of old women upon that log… and that’s partly because it’s all too easy to assume that fourteen old ladies picked at random would have had more sense than to climb up on that log all at once in the first place.
Hmm. Well, anyway. May we all avoid the cold-cuts-on-our-bare-asses and plummeting-into-cesspits deaths. May we never again hear of such misfortunes occurring in the world.
And may we all recognize what a forlorn hope that is.
