One of my biggest fears is choking to death. Not because of the soul crushingly depressing angle of the whole ordeal, or the difficulty of having a choking death avenged (I expect- demand- my death be avenged, even if due to natural causes). We've all heard stories of said choker being found days later not because a concerned friend or loved one checked in to make sure all is well but a neighbor, fed up with the putrid smell waffing into their garishly decorated abode, postpones their How I Met Your Mother marathon to see what all the hullabaloo is about.
"Gasp!" the neighbor gasps, "The poor thing! He/she (choking is an equal opportunity killer) must have been dead for days! Surely he/she wasn't living such an isolated, lonely life that no one would notice they stopped breathing sometime last week?" The neighbor calls the cops and convenes with neighbors outside, arms crossed and brows furrowed, each softly shaking their head and insincerely lamenting the loss of someone who couldn't chew Doritos correctly.
Although finding a rotting corpse is enough to ruin one's day, can you imagine the tragedy of finding a fresh corpse? Fresh Corpse of Bel Air. To walk the rest of your days knowing you were minutes, seconds away from saving a life, however inconsequential that life ultimately was. "You saved the life of the assistant manager of an under-performing Albertsons! GOOD FUCKING JOB, here's your feel good story in the less successful of two local newspapers and a $25 gift certificate to the Outback Steakhouse furthest from your house." Whether deceased for some time or fresh to death (Ha! A pun and my daily black vernacular reference!) a stranger's death oftentimes leads one towards ambivalence moreso than sadness. The only difference between reading a stranger's obituary and being there as it becomes breaking news is physical proximity; emotionally, one may as well be on a different planet.
But enough about other dead people; let us discuss me as a dead person, for I am louder than other people and thus important. I fear choking to death because I know in my heart of hearts that it will be just after I have opened my internet browser but just before I delete my recent history. What horrors will be made known to my family and friends that Clear Recent History had so deftly shielded in the past? Will they just peruse my visited pages, or painstakingly click each and every link I failed to delete?
Hopefully I will have left behind something lightly skimmed over and disregarded, such as two hours spent looking for the current whereabouts of the voice cast of The Land Before Time VI or my search for absurdist non sequiturs. "Why was he googling 'violent waffles?' What does that even mean?" More probable, however, will be the unanswered agony of why I kept bouncing between the Wikipedia page of E. B. White and five separate tabs of interracial bukkake. Or a plethora of eye surgery pictures. Or interracial eye surgery bukkake.
These are the things that keep me up at night.
