Lesson of the day: What to do so as not to die

It’s Monday and I’m still feeling the consequences of a brilliant Saturday night.
I can’t say that much about it without incriminating people, so I’m not going to; but it involved free champagne, a French couple, a German pornstar and a lot of Tom Waits. My neck is stiff as Keanu Reeves, my shoulders are hung, someone must have been dancing on my back, and then there are the tell-tale bruises. I got up pretty early today, though. Not because I’m in a great spirit, but because I just didn’t get up at all Sunday. Except for making toast.

That’s when I almost got killed.

I got my toaster from my mother and sister when I was moving in to the place I live, and for the entire period I have had no other breakfast than toast. Toast with salami, toast with pepperoni, toast with bell pepper ham, toast with BBQ powder and on and on times number of assorted types of sausages. The only exceptions have been them days I wake up with a 7/11 dinner on the floor, or nuke the leftover cheeseburger with fries I couldn’t finish. I have a strong digestion system.
You would think that I love toast, but I don’t.
I don’t hate it, but it’s the same deal as with anything else you do too often. It gets boring. In the end, I eat not to die from starvation, and what I eat isn’t nearly as important as that I eat at all. And with all the melted cheese in a toast, it lasts longer.

So I was making myself a toast. I had exactly enough cheese for two toasts, and standing there in my playboy morning gown, I mastered the zen of kitchenry when my toaster refused to co-operate. There were no ligths in the little red nor the little green light. Bad connection.
When you’re overly hung over, things like these are enough to make me cry.
Why can’t the world just, for once, play on my team? Please?

I was standing there wriggling the plug when POOOFFF! a blue/yellow electric fire stood out from the bottom off it as some four thousand household volts rode off into the sunset. Luckily I didn’t get to play the part of path of least resistance. It took me a split second of a second to decide what to do. As a kid we were trained for this in kindergarten; what do you do if one of your mates are lit up like a x-mas tree having stuck a fork in the outlet?
a) call a lawyer?
b) turn off the lights
c) check the temperature
d) throw water on ‘im
e) disconnect from electric grid then put out fire
f) leave the premises and let someone else deal with it

If you don’t know what answer’s the correct one, you might not be able to respond correctly to the situation. People are killed yearly for not knowing what to do, since they all automatically do d) throw water on [whatever’s burning]. Everyone knows water and electricity are like coke and burps. We’ve seen Jaws. But sitting on the couch or at the cinema and knowing what the people on screen should be doing, is a lot easier than being on the screen and facing a 100 feet monster shark and doing it. Doing it in, perhaps. Anyway.

You should e) disconnect from the electric grid then put out the fire.

Which I did. There was a big, black mark on the white kitchen bench. Damn. Am I going to have to pay for this? was my only thought. Then one of my co-habitants entered the scene asking what smelled so funny. It could have been the hair on my dead, burning body. She was shocked and terrified, and at the same time happy that nothing serious had happened.
"You could’ve been killed."
Took me a moment to let that’n sink in.

That would be the day.
«Sigg3, age 22. Loved by at least two people. Read by maybe four, maybe. Wrote books. Studied philosophy at the University of Oslo, played the drums and enjoyed exploring the adventures of life. Killed in cold blood by vicious toaster.»

You always suppose you’ll go down the same way that you’ve lived. If you’re a policeman you’ll be shot in a drug bust. If you’re a priest it will be in a duel with a vampire. If you’re Hunter S. Thompson it’ll be drugs or a sawn-off shotgun. If you’re Steve Irwin it will be the tail of a stingray. It kind of makes sense, and it pays off in drama. Who would’ve applauded Shakespeare’s play if Romeo had been killed in a horse cart accident? Or smashed to death from a falling tree they had to cut down? Accidently walking into a cage with circus lions? Crushed to death by a horny walrus? Ok. You could see that coming.
But killed by a toaster?

I guess it happens more often than we like to think. Most people like to think dying is something that only applies to someone else, like AIDS. Die? Me? You’re kidding, right? But I guess it happens this way more than often. On a Sunday afternoon in a playboy morning gown, with a stiff neck and an acheing back, making myself a toast. It was such an everyday situation, that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had died. Until I realized I was invisible, and could go through walls, talk with Whoopi Goldberg and stuff. And the economic relief, naturally. Being dead is possibly the cheapest thing you can do. But I’m not cheap. And I refuse to let a damn toaster stand between me and a happy future! For once the rest of the world was on my team.