My mom fell down the stairs.
I fell down the stairs often when I was a kid. My parents always got worried when I fell down the stairs. I thought it was fun. I never got hurt. We had carpeted steps. I used to ride laundry baskets down the stairs. (More accurately said, my brother and my sister used to place me in a laundry basket and push me down the stairs.)
I stopped falling down the stairs with fiend frequency when I got older. I don’t remember falling down one single set of stairs between the ages of 17 and 27. (Earth’s gravity must have changed during that decade?)
The first time I fell down the stairs after my decade-long drought, I understood my parents' worry. The steps weren't carpeted. I was afraid to take inventory of my body, thinking I had broken something. My backside felt like it was beaten with bocce balls. My elbows had bruises the size of grapefruits. My ego caught the worst of it. Falling down the stairs as an adult in front of other adults is more embarrassing than throwing a gender-reveal party.
One of the biggest enemies of humankind is falling. According to a website that looked trustworthy enough for me to not validate its trustworthiness, falls are the leading cause of accidental deaths in the elderly. (Aren't most deaths accidental?) There’s something sad about this.
If you asked every thirty-year-old on the planet How will you die? I don't think many would guess they'd cease to exist after a tiny tumble onto carpeted flooring. Alas, the numbers suggest otherwise.
If you want to see how I'm building muscle that's mobile enough to survive future somersaults down sets of stairs, check out the anthonyectomy. I don't know how I'm gonna leave this world, but you can bet my skeleton isn't going to explode like Dry Bones' after I slip on a soap-soaked ceramic floor.
May the Gains be with you,
Ant