“Holy crap! I crashed my car into a power pole. Good thing I’m not seriously injured. Whoa, watch out for the downed power lines! Can’t believe I wasn’t hurt. Must be my lucky day. Man, I have to piss…  Argghh!!!”

Roy Messenger is dead. I’m sure if he knew there were live wires in the ditch where he was urinating, he wouldn’t have urinated on them. And that would have prevented him from being electrocuted when the electricity traveled up his urine stream and into his body, which is what authorities believe happened. 

I’m sorry if it seems I’m making fun of Messenger in a Darwin Awards kind of way, as others are in the comments here. I don’t want to mock him. I guess I am, though I shouldn’t. His family is mourning. He might have been a nice guy who just made a bad mistake. It’s a misjudgment any of us could have made. Well, maybe not that particular misjudgment, but many of us have done really stupid things at some point in our lives, or have just done things without thinking at all, or have been too drunk to make good decisions, and didn’t get killed because we weren’t in dangerous circumstances, or chance was on our side. We got lucky. 

True, some people do exceptionally dumb things, very often, and make it less likely that chance will be on their side. It isn’t just luck. But if we think about our own lives and the close calls we’ve had, the bad decisions we’ve made, we might be a bit less smug when making fun of the stupidity of others (of course, I say this as someone who wrote the smug first paragraph to this post). Maybe we make fun of these things in part because it allows us to feel superior, that we are above that kind of stupidity, even though there was that one time when… well, it could have ended very badly. But it didn’t.

When someone crashes into a power pole and somehow is lucky enough to not be badly hurt, but then gets killed because he pees on the power lines he knocked down when he crashed into the pole, there’s something about that sudden reversal of fortune, resulting from a bad decision, that people think is funny.

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