A Million Ways To Die (Or At Least 60, Or 23 I Guess)

For at least 4 years now, I’ve had a piece of paper on my desk that I can’t bring myself to throw away. On one side is some official receipt to do with my pension, but that’s not why I can’t just toss it in the trash. No, it’s because on the OTHER side, there’s a complete mystery. On the other side, it says the following:

60       
9 in a boat
1 bound and gagged
5 in tunnels or caves
4 peeking in windows
IIII in or with a plane

Now, you know I love a good mystery, and if you’ve followed me for a long time, you’ll be familiar with topics like The Mystery Of The Tip Sheet On The Table, A Salty Mystery, The Mystery Of The Box Of Porn On The Porch, and A Mouse-y Mystery, among many more complex and globally vital cases. Most recently, I penned Within A Month, where I tried to solve the mystery of the piece of paper stuck to my sandal that read “One month from July 25th”. Never did solve that one—August 25th came and went without any major catastrophe OR windfall.

But this—this piece of paper on my desk stymies me for a variety of reasons. First and most baffling? It was written by ME. How can I NOT remember why I wrote this series of statements? I mean I KNOW I wrote it, mostly because it seems to be in my handwriting, which is terrible, and the addition is completely wrong, which is very true to my mathematical prowess. 9+1+5+4+4 does NOT equal 60. I know that because I used a calculator to double check. And I KNOW it was a long time ago, but I can remember my student number from university in 1985, and I can recite a variety of poems and Shakespearian soliloquys, so why can’t I remember THIS?

Second, it’s written on the back of a receipt from 2021. What the hell was I doing in 2021 that would have compelled me to write out this list? I’m obviously keeping track of something—I thought initially that it may be some kind of criminal activity, given the number of people who are bound, gagged, trapped in tunnels and caves, set adrift at sea, or dabbling in voyeurism. But then there’s the plane. IN a plane, sure, but WITH a plane? Like, someone was killed when they wandered onto a runway? Ooh, maybe the person who was killed was a pilot and the murderer tampered with his plane. Or maybe the killer bludgeoned someone with a toy plane—or a wood plane. And why does my mind go IMMEDIATELY TO MURDER?? Well, have you met me? You could show me a picture of a flower, or a lawnmower, or gardening gloves (you can probably guess what I’ve been focused on now that the weather continues charming), and I would without hesitation begin mentally creating a short story where something terrible and twisted happens. I mean, the list on my desk could be completely innocuous, maybe about puppies getting up to hijinks, if it wasn’t for the fact that, if true, one of the puppies was “bound and gagged”, and I don’t think that EVER happened in Four Little Puppies.

He’s both in and with a plane.

So for wont of a rational explanation, this mystery will remain unsolved, unless one of you can understand what it all means. Or maybe I’ll remember why I wrote all of this down on August 25.

And speaking of mysteries…

I cannot in a MILLION years figure out why anyone would think this ad is a good way to sell a couch. A couch that SMELLS WEIRD. If your couch needs to be reupholstered because it looks like sh*t, and it also smells like sh*t, maybe you shouldn’t be asking $100 for it, FRED. I know lots of men with “mancaves” but they all have higher standards than that. Mostly because their wives won’t let them get away with having such an appallingly horrible smelly piece of furniture in there. I’ll have to add that to my mystery list—“1 on a couch”…

36 thoughts on “A Million Ways To Die (Or At Least 60, Or 23 I Guess)”

  2. Oh gawd, sometimes I can’t remember why I got up to go into the other room to do. Yes, menopause has my cognitive health doing all kinds of shit right now. I hope you figure it out because it sounds like you wrote down something you may have had a dream about, woke up to write it down, for a book you were thinking of writing, and went back to sleep….lol.

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  3. You know you love a mystery so you’ve created one for yourself. But I don’t want the explanation to be that simple. Your brain knows you love a mystery so you went sleepwalking and left yourself ideas for stories, and I don’t think you wrote all these at once. Even that seems too mundane, though, and why didn’t anyone else notice you sleepwalking? I think you have a doppelgänger who comes out of your miniatures and grows to full size only long enough to leave you these notes.

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  5. This looks like you’ve been participating in solving some kind of riddle that goes something along the lines of: “A band of 60 adventurers looking for gold and are waylaid by various measures… [that are then described at exhaustive length – 19 are accounted for, with another 4 groups of ten doing assorted aviation tasks]… so who get’s the gold?” You do, the single remaining member of the 60. A bit like “as I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives.” (The riddle for me was ‘WHICH St Ives? Cornwall or Cambridgeshire?’. I admit to being overly focused on geography.)

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  7. As a former Paramedic for over two decades, I have seen almost every single way someone can die. I have never heard of someone getting killed by being hit in the head with a wooden airplane. If it ever happened, that right there would be a new one for me.

    Also, I love mysterious notes, like the one you have. I used to collect notes I found when I was in college because I didn’t have a car, and had to literally walk everywhere. One of the notes once read, “Hey Mag, everybody sells orange juice after you’ve lost your wallet”.

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  8. It’s maddening when you can’t remember things, but we all go through that. 😝 This list sounds like research, possibly for a future novel?

    Fred is delusional if he thinks anyone will pay $100 for that disgusting couch! 🙄

    Thanks for reading my story at Happiness Between Tails. I’m enjoying your site and love your sense of humour. Cheers!

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  9. barbaramullenix's avatar barbaramullenix says:

    This is the EXACT reason I now write all my notes in detail. I can no longer trust my memory to be aware of cryptic messages. No matter how mundane (buy milk) I have to be specific or else I either don’t buy the right thing or wonder why I wrote it since I don’t drink milk. Details are essential to my getting by with my memory still in (mostly) working order.

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  16. We unexpectedly inherited a couch when we moved to our current house. I thought it was a cute couch for the basement…until…we noticed it had a horrible smell. It was then dubbed “The Vomit Couch”, and it was nearly impossible to move up the basement stairs. (Which is why, surely, it was left behind.) My husband did the only sensible thing: Cut it into pieces with a sawzall and took it to the dump. BUT, if I’d known a person could get $100 for smelly furniture…

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