At three o'clock this morning my smoke alarm went off. Despite being deep in the arms of Morpheus I was proud of my reaction. Snapping from sleep to wakeful alertness in no more than fifteen minutes I rolled out of bed, seized the smoke alarm, tore it apart, ripped out the battery and went back to sleep. I thought that was a pretty good reaction time. When I mentioned it to the guys from the fire brigade they seemed rather impressed as well.
Living, as I do, in an apartment made largely of brick and poor quality concrete I have never thought of my home as being particularly flammable. Especially as my one concession to a sensible lifestyle is to never smoke in bed. Then I looked around at the thousands of books which cram my little home and I realise that there are petroleum storage facilities less combustible than my domicile.
I didn't realise that I lived on such a knife edge of danger. To compensate I have taken urgent steps to upgrade my apathy level. The measure of my success can be found in my realisation that if I did indeed wake in the middle of the night to find my apartment full of smoke I would probably just go back to bed. After all if flames engulfed your home how would you prefer to be found? Lying peacefully in bed or sprawled, hideously charred on the lounge room floor having made an obviously futile attempt to crawl to safety as the flames surrounded you. Think of your relatives; I'm sure they would prefer to think of you going peacefully in your sleep as opposed to writhing, screaming in pain while bits of you caught fire.
It is terribly important, for the sake of your loved ones, that you arrange the right sort of death. Giving the impression that your passing was painless is important in this regard. When your family look down at you you want them to say things like "At least he didn't suffer" rather than "Who's that?" Apparently it makes the subject a little less dead if they didn't suffer or something. If you can't arrange painless the next best option is quick. "At least it was quick," say the bereaved as the paramedics tell them the story of how they had to hose the deceased off five kilometres of motorway. Perhaps it was; quick and still dead. Of course quick and painless is the best option of all so if you're going to die try and contrive a high speed collision with a morphine storage facility.
If you do manage a quick and painless death you will encounter the third popular comment for relatives of the departed, "We didn't have a chance to say goodbye". At this point the corpse can be forgiven for bursting out of the coffin and screaming "What the hell do you people want? I'm dead already." I wonder how the relatives would react to that?
Of course if you really want to be remembered then at the first indication of impending death use your remaining moments to squeeze into that leather fetish gear you keep for emergencies (just me? Really?) even if your only usual contact with leather is a sensible pair of shoes. This will ensure that your remembrance ceremony is filled with people trying very hard not to remember; and failing.
On balance though perhaps the peaceful death option is best. All of which is a rather long winded explanation for why I've decided not to replace the battery in my smoke detector.
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Good clear thinking, as usual. I'm going to follow suit, if only to frustrate the busybody gas inspector who has told us to punch a hole in the wall of our new kitchen (as the regs have changed since it was first built), and fit a carbon monoxide detector.
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