[ WP ] Everyone dies on their birthday , but no one knows at which age it will occur .

Defibrillator. Check. Bandages and gauze. Check. Flashlight. Check. Smoke detector and fire extinguisher. Check. Louisville Slugger. Check. Book of Sudoku. Check. The most recent Jack Reacher novel. Check. Jug of water. Check. Alien box set DVD with commentary from cast. Check. 
 
 I started the list five days ago. It went on, longer than it had to. Some of the items remained unchecked. For example, pornographic magazines. Or the Swiss army knife. I might fall on the knife, or jacking off might give me a heart-attack. There were others too. I started it early because the last time I didn ’ t bring enough entertainment and my boredom led way to catastrophic thoughts, elevated heart-rate, which put me at risk for going into shock. I started the list because certain necessary items might slip my mind if I started it 24 or 48 hours ago. I was getting old. The old biological computer did n't run so smooth anymore. I gave myself ample time, and included every possible need or want that I could conjure up, and over the course of five days the list grew to three and a half pages of manic, scribbled notes with question marks, ticks, and asterisk denoting them as extraneous, imperative, or debatable. 
 
 At the stroke of midnight I locked and bolted the doors, turned off the heat in case of carbon monoxide poisoning, and waited. 
 
 There were two types of logic when it came to birthdays. A: Death was coming whether you took precautions or not. For example, death might ’ ve planned for you to perish in a horrendous car accident, smashed into jelly. If you didn ’ t drive that day, then it would set you up to spontaneously combust instead. It didn ’ t much care about the means so much as the end. B: As long as you canceled out the specific method that death planned for you, you could extend your life indefinitely by taking extreme precautions and using common sense. 
 
 My logic went like this. It was impossible to tell how exactly death went about its business, but one might as well assume the option B was the case. If option A was reality, than it wouldn ’ t matter. Many people carried on with their usual routine on their birthday, as calm as Buddhist monks. I considered these people fools. If one subscribed to option B, than at least there was a faint hope of escaping the enveloping blackness known as death. Why not try to avoid one ’ s own end if there was even a small chance that death was easily duped? 
 
 For those who subscribed to option B, the unnaturally long life of Edith Junger, who finally died a brain hemorrhage at age 204, or Roger Moore, who was viciously robbed and bludgeoned in his own house at the age of 198, made for compelling cases. Neither of them ever left their houses on the anniversary of their birth. There was no need to, take a sick day. The birthday parties always came the day after anyways. Of course death eventually got wise, but these cases also seemed to suggest that death was stupid and near incompetent, or at least wasn ’ t in any particular rush. He had customers every day of the year, so he was extraordinarily busy. 
 
 At 12:01 I sat down in front of the television. I had moved the coffee table into storage until tomorrow. Nasty, sharp edges to fall on. If my temple met one of those corners, it might just do the trick. I might trip on my own shoelaces. For that reason, I also moved all my shoes into storage. 
 
 The meteor crashed through the roof at 12:07. Alien had just started. In the split second I became an unidentifiable smear, I felt honored that I had caused death so much grief that it had to send a rock from out space after me. I supposed I had a good run. I died as happy as one could be on one ’ s birthday, at the age of 347. 

