Trego's Mountain Ear

Time was when I found humor in the Darwin Awards – it’s a little sick, but people did find some humorous ways to die. Hell, it’s a lot sick – but humor tends to be a case of something happening to someone else. It was here in Trego, when someone commented that it looked like someone in Brookings had just got a Darwin award.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Darwin awards, they’re given for removing oneself from the gene pool in some spectacular manner. The young man in Brookings did that – though I don’t know if he made it into the book. When I returned to campus (SDSU) I learned more – his mother was the department secretary on the floor below my office. And she was a friend.

Frankly, she handled her son’s death better than I would have – though that may be small praise. The question was simple: How could he do something so stupid?” The answer was in the question – he wasn’t real bright, and he had read how to make a bomb from sparklers on the net. Reading the cautions would have been a good idea – but he was assembling his bomb in his lap when he pushed in one sparkler too many. I didn’t answer – and there was no honest way of saying he didn’t suffer.

But I haven’t read anything on the Darwin Awards since I listened to her grief. The humor was gone.