Thread by @ryanqnorth

Here's the story of how I almost died when I was 24.

It was 2004, and I was living alone. I'd had bought a lava lamp years ago, moving it from place to place but never really plugging it in. This morning, I finally decided to plug it in... only to discover that the bulb had burned out.

Lava lamps work are, basically, wax suspended in water. The bulb heats the wax, causing it to melt and move up through the water, where it cools, causing it to fall. The result: cool trippy patterns.

Of course the lamp's bulb was some weird specialty thing specially designed to generate heat, and I had no idea where to get another one. But there was an easy solution. If all you need is heat...

...I had an electric stove that could do THAT no problem.

So I turned the range on low, put the glass part of the lamp (which, conveniently, had a flat bottom) on top of the element, and sat back to enjoy the show.

But it was taking a long time... and at some point during my past moves, the wax had gotten partially blended into the water, making it cloudy. So, after few minutes, I eventually convinced myself that it wasn't going to work that well anyway, and turned off the stove.

THE END...

...until a few months later, in November 2004, when I read THIS story:

nbcnews.com/id/6621680/ns/…

This 24 years old guy Phillip Quinn goes missing, and when his parents check on his place, find him dead on top of his bed - and weird shards of broken glass on top of his stove.

You guessed it. Mr. Quinn - who was the same age as I was then, incidentally, was heating his lava lamp on the stove. The glass container is sealed, so when the water got hot enough, the pressure increased - and it became a glass bomb.

It exploded, he was standing nearby watching it, and some of the glass pierced his heart. He stumbled onto his bed and dies. "Why on earth he was heating a lava lamp on the stove, we don't know," said the police spokesperson.

But I knew. Because I'd come close - I don't know HOW close - to dying in the exact same way, earlier that year.

( Incidentally, it's such an unlikely death that Snopes has a page about it: snopes.com/fact-check/lav… )

I'm thinking about this today because I saw this Twitter moment about a man who swallowed a slug on a dare: the slug had a ratworm infection that partially paralyzed him, and finally killed him today, eight years later.

twitter.com/i/events/10594…

One stupid decision and just like that, his entire life is ended.

Don't eat slugs, don't put your lava lamps on stoves, and have sympathy for people who die in "stupid ways". Because in a parallel universe just a hair's breath away from this one, I died alone in 2004, and I'm not here to tell you this.

<3