Contest: What Will Contribute to Your Tragic Demise?
Jeff VanderMeer • May 1st, 2008 @ 5:42 pm • Culture
For me, it will either be my sincere affection for the occasional cigar–very excited about the Oliva Series V’s I picked up today!!–or my equally sincere affection for good beer (as evidenced by Ann ordering 12 bottles of Arrogant Bastard, leaving Portland, Oregon, right…about…now).
So, please tell me what’s gonna cause your tragic downfall over time. Deadline, Monday at midnight EST. Er, you can be silly, serious, absurd, whatever. The winners, as selected by Matt Staggs of Enter the Octopus (“Huh? What? I am?”), will receive:
First place, our advance copy of this very obscure book:
Four runners-up, a copy of the Spectra Pulse magazine (as blogged here):
May 1, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Squirrels. Rabid, vampiric ones. I’ve been threatened with them for over two years now by a woman I know and I’m sure eventually I’ll piss her off enough that she’d unleash a horde of them upon me while I was sleeping.
May 1, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I (and many of my non-coffee drinking peers) will be cut down in the first wave of the Diet Coke Drinker die-off, currently predicted for 2027. Several decades of ingesting the evil, toxic brew will cut short the lives of many former students and office wage slaves, who chose to get their caffeine hit in fizzy form.
May 1, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Absinthe. I want to get my hands on some Kubler Absinthe since it’s now legal in the states. Other than that I would say just good ole alcohol.
May 1, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Pizza with plenty of anchovees. But, as Murphy´s Law goes, when the next-to-last pizza that would kill me arrives at my building´s entrance, I´ll trip on a stray skateboard forgotten by some of the not-so-nice youngsters who plague the building, and, howling in pain and limping, will return at once to my apartment, thus forgetting to get the pizza – which will be my utter, unescapable demise, since I will be killed by my sweet wife, who, right that day, will be passing through her worst PMT day EVER. My last word, of course, won´t be “Rosebud”, but “anchoveees…”
May 1, 2008 at 6:34 pm
â€Huh? What? I am?â€
May 1, 2008 at 6:48 pm
This one is easy. It is the little voice inside my head that, after a few cold IPAs, tells me that, just this once, the shrimp sambal at Grendel’s Den won’t liquefy my innards like I swallowed a very small star. The fact that I am moving right down the street from East Coast Grill and their dreaded spicy food Hell Nights does not bode well.
May 1, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Either the Domino’s Meaty Meaty Meat Meat pizza (with added meat) or the vegan pizza available from http://www.hell.co.nz. No dairy, sure, but all that free pizza space is taken up with chillies.
Then again, my new hobby may do me in. I will be (posthumously) known as the inventor of rollerskate jousting!
May 1, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Crushed by my to be read mountain of books, 509 at last count.
May 1, 2008 at 9:24 pm
A heart attack from stress over nothing and, once in a blue moon, something that deserves to be stressed out about. And also drinking 8 cups of coffee, which I downed in one sitting today. And sitting over a story going nuts because I worked on it for like four hours and it ended up sucking BAD. And getting stalked and killed by editors because I’m probably going to send that story to them anyway.
May 1, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Gerald Ford.
Oh, I know you’re all thinking “Wait, isn’t he dead?” – well yes, yes he is, but his EVIL LIVES ON!!
May 2, 2008 at 12:23 am
Bears. They live all over the world, run faster than most professional athletes, swim for miles on the open sea, and their savage teeth and claws move with lightning speed even despite their huge size. Translation: when a bear decides to kill me there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it.
May 2, 2008 at 3:21 am
My own laziness. I went hungry for 3 days because I didn’t feel like making the 2 minutes trip to the store to get bread and cooking was too much trouble. Like one of my good friends puts it, one day I’ll be too lazy to breathe.
May 2, 2008 at 8:14 am
Gonads. CLEARLY.
May 2, 2008 at 8:35 am
Many years ago, a crackhead who lived beneath my then-girlfriend/now-wife (I know she was a crackhead because, well, you can just tell, and because of the awkward “you know I smoke crack cocaine, don’t you?” conversation she had with my wife) was shot twice in the back. Now, I’m sure you’re assuming she was shot as the result of dealings with purveyors of illicit substances. However, this was not the case, at least according to said purchaser of illicit substances. No, upon lifting the back of her shirt to show the bandaged wounds, my wife’s neighbor revealed that she was shot because she “knew things about God.”
Maybe a year later from that illuminative and totally not awkward conversation, I was visiting my then-girlfriend, when I noticed a large sheet of taped together pieces of paper pasted inside the window of the downstairs apartment. Scrawled across the paper with magic marker was the message “God has a cat’s eye.” Unfortunately now I too “know things about God,” so it is only a matter of time before the men who attempted to silence to my wife’s crackhead ex-neighbor come for me. They haven’t made a move yet though, so who knows when they may strike?
Oh no, I’m sorry. I may have just doomed you all. My bad.
May 2, 2008 at 10:20 am
hubris, fate, and the will of the gods
but then, I’m a traditionalist
May 2, 2008 at 10:30 am
My simultaneous desires to satisfy my newfound obsession with BSG and complete three assignments will lead to fatal sleep deprivation, or starvation, or maybe my eyeballs will explode. That is, if my new manager doesn’t kill me first (frankly I wouldn’t blame her – it’s amazing how worked up I got over, wait for it, chicken nuggets).
May 2, 2008 at 12:55 pm
i’m hoping for death by karaoke. i want to spontaneously combust while attempting a heroic high note, ideally the third ‘galileo’ of “bohemian rhapsody,” but i’m not picky…i just don’t want my dying words to be something tragic like, “i love you like a fat kid loves cake.”
ps, señor vandermeer, i like the smokin’ labbit that’s using your cigar box as a litterbox.
May 2, 2008 at 1:56 pm
My corporate, soul-sucking capitalistic tool of a day job…ha ha, just kidding in case anyone I work with reads your blog, Jeff. Here’s to at least being fired instead of dying in harness, as it were. One consolation – red vines in the employee lounge.
What I REALLY want to be is a publisher…ha, that would kill me quicker! ;)
May 2, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Susie: Finally, someone notices the labbit!!!!
Rina: Yes, oh yes, publisher. It’s a combo of herding cats and listening to the sound of money disappearing out the window…
Jeff
May 2, 2008 at 5:05 pm
A plastic straw will be my tragic demise. Here’s how it was ordained: that I will be driving with a book propped open before me against the steering wheel, drinking from a Taco Bell cup, when suddenly some multi-task-challenged fop in front of me will throw his cell phone down and slam on his breaks. Accordingly, I’ll have to slam on my breaks, and the impact will send me flying forward, and the straw from my Taco Bell cup will slide neatly through the gelatinous goo of my retina and puncture my brain.
If I don’t die from that experience, the Taco Bell will effectively do the job by gradual cholesterol build-up and inevitable heart-attack. Either way I’ll be pretty pissed about not being able to finish my book.
May 3, 2008 at 11:47 am
CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously, I’m a chocoholic. Even though dark chocolate is good for the heart, I’ll probably be craming some down my throat so fast I’ll choke to death on it.
Either that or I’ll drown in a vat of the stuff while finally going on a tour of the English Cadbury factory. (Cause their chocolate is far superior to American Herseys. I wish I had a Wispa Gold right now.)
May 3, 2008 at 6:40 pm
my love of fried foods and bourbon WILL lead to my tragic demise. I, of course, will go smiling and very happy. Damn the research! I have an addiction…. grease!
This link sums up my problem:
http://xkcd.com/418/
May 4, 2008 at 9:17 am
My sarcasm. It’s become so ingrained that all but my closest friends and family can’t tell when I’m being sincere. Someone’s either going to murder me because of it or it’ll confuse the paramedics. Either way I’m toast.
No, really.
May 4, 2008 at 10:09 am
Indecision.
May 4, 2008 at 2:54 pm
My untimely demise will be the direct result of a nice bit of sibling-fu known as the “Eye-Bong.”
This maneuver is a testament to the playful (and crazy) nature of my older sister. For the uninitiated, an Eye-Bong is the two-fingered eye poke made famous by The Three Stooges, accompanied by my sister’s signature refrain of “Bong-Bong!†(I use the far more subtle “Ffft-Ffft†for my return Bongs.)
Eye-Bongs are always surprise attacks. If I am quick, I can block my sister’s advance by holding my hand flat and vertical, catching her between the fingers. That rarely works. Luckily, the Bong, if properly administered, stops just short of making contact with the eyes. (Bongs can also be thrown from a distance, requiring you to either block the move in mid-air or blink repeatedly to show you have been Bonged.)
How we will die: my sister likes to Bong me in the car.
She often jokes that one day she will Bong me while I’m driving, miss, and actually poke me in the eyes. The car will spin out of control and we will both die in a fiery inferno, her fingers forever frozen in a charred two-pronged gesture, my eyes wide in horror (or possibly stuck to the ends of her fingers), both our mouths contorted into a scream forever silenced. Authorities will be baffled. Our parents will be pissed (as they will immediately recognize how the hell this happened).
Bong-Bong!
The end.