Tim and I once played a game we called Trying to Gross Each Other Out, which eventually turned into a brainstorm to figure out what we thought were the ten worst ways to die. I don’t know why only ten. I guess just to keep the list manageable.
The ten ways we came up with were: falling, burned, suffocated, disemboweled, torn to pieces, cut to pieces, cut in half, impaled, crushed, and wasted by disease. We tended to name the categories a little more, ah, colorfully because, after all, this was a gross-out.
Dave’s list:
falling ten thousand feet from an airplane
burned at the stake
eviscerated by a pack of wild hyenas
butchered by axe-wielding psycho
torn limb from limb by gorillas
slow death by disease
impaled on giant spike
buried alive
slowly crushed to death
cut in half by giant propeller
In case you haven’t already gone to another web page in disgust and you’re still with me, here’s how I decided that falling to my death was worse than being eviscerated by wild animals: I started out with the scariest way to die. To me there’s nothing worse than falling. Nothing. Some people like jumping from airplanes, and I even tried it because everybody made it look so fun, only to find out it scared the holy hell out of me. It is the activity most fundamentally opposed to fun that I can think of, and I figure the only thing that could make it worse would be falling to my death.
Then I looked at the next thing on our list and asked myself: If I had to choose between being burned to death or falling to death, which would I pick? Well, since falling to my death is the most awful thing I can conceive of, it’s a no-brainer. And then, being eaten alive sounds pretty awful, but I can’t imagine it being worse than perishing by fire. And so on.
I showed Tim my list after I was done. “Dude! You put falling at the top?” I get this from people all the time. Almost nobody had the reaction I got from skydiving.
Tim’s list:
butchered by axe-wielding psycho
eviscerated by a pack of wild hyenas
burned at the stake
torn limb from limb by gorillas
impaled on giant spike
slowly crushed to death
falling ten thousand feet from an airplane
slow death by disease
buried alive
cut in half by giant propeller
He put being cut to pieces at the top because the murderous intent made it the scariest thing he could imagine. Same thing for being messily devoured.
Barb’s only comment on our game, when she passed through the room and heard about ten seconds of our conversation, was, “You guys are sick.” And women say they want men to open up to them. No, they don’t.
This Is Drivel 