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Using basic reasoning skills and forethought, rational man Niall Sheehan survived another day by deciding against painting a bullseye on his chest and streaking through an archery range.
“I don’t think I will do that,” said Sheehan, deciding not to rip off his work clothes in the middle of the office, paint a black and red bullseye on his bare chest, and sprint naked through the nearest archery range while shouting, “Ten points for my groin, fifty points for my head!” “I’m smart enough to know that if I did that, people at the archery range would get angry and maybe even call the police. Also, they might shoot me.”
“No thank you,” added Sheehan before resuming his paperwork.
Sheehan, a classically sensible 34-year-old with the capacity to deconstruct his actions and determine whether or not they are absurd, chooses daily not to walk blindfolded across a highway at night while wearing a black morph suit, rub chum all over himself and jump into the shark tank at the zoo with an anchor attached to his ankles, and lock himself in a kennel without a cellphone and eat fistfuls of lithium batteries without any way of contacting medics for an emergency endoscopy.
“I would like very much not to break all the bones in my body in the middle of the desert alone,” said Sheehan, employing coherent logic in order to convince himself not to drive to the Mojave desert by himself and attempt to do a quadruple backflip off of a sheer rock face on a BMX bike without ever having ridden a bike before. “I’m a pretty astute guy.”
“I would be upset if I were locked in a damp tomb until I starved to death,” added Sheehan, planning his trip to Egypt next month and making a sound judgment that straying from a tour group at the Pyramid of Khafre, crawling into pharaoh Khufu’s tomb and covering himself with a stone slab so no one could find him “would obviously be bad.”
At press time, Sheehan decided to walk his dog instead of camouflaging himself against the brick wall of a building that’s about to get demolished.
