I arrived home from work yesterday after an uneventful day at the restaurant. Nothing of interest had really happened during the day. Customers came and went. Some were nice and friendly and good tippers. Others were bastards. But in general it was just another day in another town in good ol’ USA.

When I arrived home, my wife was not there yet so I parked on the grass by the driveway. I could have parked on the driveway itself but that would have meant she would park behind me and if I needed to go out again, which I inevitably have to almost every evening, I would have to use her old Geo Prism instead of my brand new 2010 Corolla and that just wont do. A guy needs to have standards.

Anyway.

So I park on the grass and I turn off the car. I look out my window and there is a man standing on the yard of the house next to us. Decent looking fellow, maybe in his fifties and this is unusual in itself because the house next to us has been unoccupied for almost two years now. Evidently it is on the market for purchase or rent but no one will touch it with a ten foot pole. I’m not sure why… maybe it’s because of the lousy neighbors, who knows.

Back to the gentleman on the yard. Well I assumed, naturally that the man standing there was either the current owner or someone unfortunate enough to buy the property and I was going to leave it at that, until, I noticed the man was holding a rather large machete.

Well, now we have a strange man on the yard next to us, by a house that is all but abandoned and he’s holding a big machete. That is the kind of thing you want to pay attention to, if only for the sake of knowing which way to run.

I took a good look and he certainly didn’t look threatening, in fact he kind of looked like your average middle aged fella who serves as a CEO somewhere and plays golf with his old buddies on weekends. I waved at him and he waved back with the hand that was not holding a machete. A good sign. So, being that it didn’t look like he was going to come after me, I decided to go on my merry way and leave him to his own devices.

I was about to turn away in fact, when this man, this completely ordinary, smart looking middle aged gentleman, unexpectedly grabs his machete by the blade and casually throws it up in the air.

Well you better damn well bet I’m paying attention now.

The machete disappeared up into the branches but gravity being what it is, its came down equally fast a few feet in front of him. Undeterred, the guy walked over, picked it up, walked back to his original spot, and threw it up again.

Well, now I’m thinking I’m about to watch a very innovative and unique, if rather inefficient and probably gory form of suicide by machete. I’m imagining the first Japanese samurai that invented the hara kiri ritual suicide probably tried this method a few times before coming up with something better. At this point, as casually as I could I walked around to the other side of my car. I was almost certain death by machete would not cause too much blood splatter but hey, better safe than soaked.

By the fourth throw, however, I realized our suicidal fellow was talking to someone. This just kept getting better and better. He was killing himself by throwing a machete up in the air because voices were telling him to. Some voices will tell you the weirdest things.

I was trying to come up with the best way to describe this to the police officer who would question me but I was sure I was going to have a hard time with that one. But then, as fate would have it, I looked up took a closer look at the branches and realized he wasn’t talking to himself. He was in fact talking to another guy who was lying over a thick branch up on the tree.

Assisted suicide by machete! How clever is that! But it was soon apparent that the guy on the branch had a much more mundane mission than helping a poor friend exit this world in an original and gory way. Evidently, he wanted to trim off some branches from the tree; with a machete; which he didn’t have, because it was currently being held by this fellow standing under the tree.

Ah, now I am no longer watching an attempted assisted suicide by machete, I am in fact watching a Darwin Award in the making! Because everyone knows that if you want to transfer a machete from the ground up to a guy lying on a brand thirty feet off the ground, you simply hold your machete by the blade, throw it up as hard as you can, and hope that Isaac Newton was just bullshitting everyone about this law of gravity thing.

Well I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop watching now. This story was getting easier to tell by the minute. I was actually going to enjoy explaining this one to the police, after I wrote my full report to the Darwin Awards, of course.

“Why yes, officer, the guy up on the tree came very close to grabbing the machete that last time, unfortunately he missed by a few inches and I didn’t see very clearly what happened next but I haven’t heard that particular sound since I used to watch my grandpa split open coconuts on his backyard.”

Well, sadly after a dozen attempts or so, the guy up on the branch managed to defy the laws of physics, luck, common sense and even Murphy and actually caught the machete. Yes, I was forced to go home empty handed and dejected.

When I told my wife about the incident, she agreed with me, of course on the natural idiocy of the players involved and then she asked me why I had not offered my humble opinion that the activity on which they were engaged was not only marvelously stupid but also potentially fatal. My answer was as logical as her question.

“I am already going to write about this on my blog,” I replied, “but can you imagine how much better the story would have been if the machete had actually hit the guy standing on the ground? What makes you think I was going to interfere and ruin a potentially great story?”

She seems a little scared of me now… I can’t imagine why.

Originally Published 09/18/2009