One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is that I tend to be something of a compulsive reader, as well. I'll read just about anything: from cheesy, schmaltzy romance novels to software manuals, Molly Ivins to Miss Manners, Dear Abby to Dostoevsky. (Tolstoy turned out to be a deal-breaker, but at least I gave him a fair shot.) And you don’t even want to get me started on the Internet. As I said, anything and everything, up to and including the labels on the cans of whatever I find under the bathroom sink. (Well, you have to have something entertaining to do while you're in there!)

One of the most fascinating things I've read in a very long time is an almost transcendentally dull piece of work called the Rasmussen Report. This is not an oxymoron; the Rasmussen Report is without question the driest, coldest, most passionless thing ever to be squeezed out of a printing press (with the possible exception of the liner notes for Michael Jackson's Bad LP), and I was absolutely riveted by it. It was the definitive page-turner. Why? Because the bottom-line subject of the Rasmussen Report is death: yours, mine, everyone's, in fact.

The Rasmussen Report is a compilation of probability statistics. As such, it is almost by definition boring to the nth power. To produce it, somebody sat down with a computer and assorted documentation – newspapers, death certificates, police reports and the like – and calculated the odds of being killed in a truly astonishing variety of mishaps. Sort of a racing form for morticians, as it were. Which segues rather nicely into the next question, to wit: Who reads the Rasmussen Report? Well, aside from people who spend a lot of time in the bathroom, insurance companies do. They use it to calculate premium rates for life-insurance policies, taking into account such factors as occupation, lifestyle, environment, and other variables of that sort. Whenever anyone calculates the odds on anything, you can be fairly certain that somebody, somewhere, has a bet riding on it. And the somebody in this case is your friendly insurance company, a bunch of bookies in three-piece suits in Hartford, Connecticut.

Did you know, for example, that the odds of being killed in a nuclear power plant accident are approximately three billion to one against? Kind of makes you want to stop payment on that check you wrote to Greenpeace, doesn't it? The odds against being struck and killed by lightning, according to Rasmussen, are a little over two million to one. (Since the official odds of winning the lottery are about one in twenty-five million and change, if you plan to strike it rich playing PowerBall, you might consider staying indoors during thunderstorms.) This one ought to scare you: every time you get into your car, there is a one in three thousand chance that you will not get out of it alive. And I suspect that there is, in an often-overlooked footnote on the back page of the Report, a probability statistic on the odds of being bored to death by a book full of probability statistics.

Despite its rather morbid subject matter, the message of the Rasmussen Report is surprisingly uplifting, even optimistic. It illustrates, in precise, tabular format, that nothing in life is without some element of risk; but it also illustrates that the things that we as a culture get the most bent out of shape worrying about are also the things that are least likely to occur. We have been giving ourselves ulcers, hypertension and heart attacks by worrying about being killed in an airplane crash (odds: three million to one against), when the things most likely to kill us are . . . ulcers, hypertension and heart attacks.

Life is a crap-shoot. And despite the anti-smoking campaigners' incessant use of the phrase, there is no such thing as a 'preventable death'. Our current obsession with fitness and diet may postpone the day of reckoning for a few years, but then again, it may not. (Jim Fixx comes irresistibly to mind in this context, but not being the I-told-you-so sort, I think I’ll forego further comment.)

We are all going to die. If you don't believe me, ask your doctor. Sooner or later, it's going to happen; I guarantee it. So why is the message of the Rasmussen Report optimistic? Because the sooner we accept the fact that our trip through this world will, inevitably, have to end (the only questions being neat or messy; peaceful or painful; inevitable, tragic, or Darwin Award candidate), the sooner we can start to relax and enjoy the ride.

There is a case to be made for quality of life, as opposed to mere quantity of years. They say Methuselah lived to be nine hundred forty-nine years old, but I'm willing to lay some pretty heavy odds of my own that the last eight hundred fifty or so weren't a hell of a lot of fun. Lord Byron, on the other hand, died within sight of his thirtieth birthday, but if the reports are to be believed, he had a rollicking good time right up to the end. And at the time of his death at the age of thirty-three, Alexander the Great had conquered practically the entire known world. (When you think about it, dying was probably the only thing left for Alexander to do; once you've conquered the world, what can you do for an encore?)

There are legions of people, organizations, government agencies and assorted other busy-bodies and buttinskis whose sole mission in life is to keep me safe. With the blithely casual disregard for my opinion on the subject that only a rabid, drooling, mouth-breathing liberal can muster, they are determined to protect me from every conceivable risk in life, every danger that might befall me. I wish they wouldn't. It’s not because it is basically none of their business if I want to go through a windshield head-first. (For the record, I don’t, but it’s still my call, not theirs.) And it’s not because their efforts are, ultimately, futile. (See the “We are all going to die...” paragraph, above.) It’s because there is simply no satisfying these people.

The only way to make the safety-mongers truly happy would be to stay home: to quit my job (never mind the stress, just ask OSHA, they will tell you stories. . . !), stay inside my house, never feel the sun on my face (gotta watch that ultraviolet exposure!), never go anywhere (one in three thousand chance I won't get there). But if I do that, the radon will get me.

Or, I could take a walk down to the South Texas Nuclear Project. In a thunderstorm.

keobanion0@eastex.net

Ken O'Banion is Application Developer who works on a contractor basis for companies mostly on the East Coast; he sometimes refers to himself as an "itinerant rent-a-geek" (although he's never had the nerve to put that on the 'Occupation' line of his tax return).