Live long enough, and you pick up on some trends. If you’re paying even the slightest attention. You don’t have to be some sort of sage, doling out pearls of wisdom. Just a regular old person with his eyes open and his memory intact.

And with that prelude, let’s get to the point of this post:

I believe the primary life goal of every young male should be this:

Don’t die stupidly.

And the prompt for this? A story about the death of a 25-year-old man who fell 150 feet during a Braves game at Turner Field.

I have decided that something like 1 percent of all males between the ages of 16 and 23 “die stupidly.” And you do not want to be part of that.

The world is a dangerous enough place, full of all sorts of ways to die, even young. Combat, gang-shootings, accidents. But I’m not talking about that sort of thing. Death by road-side bomb or the East Side Homeboys or lightning bolt … those may involve some shaky decision-making but they probably Weren’t Just Plain Stupid. Combat, you knew when you signed up that was a risk you took. Gang-shootings? In a twisted way, that’s just a side-effect of embracing a lifestyle.

But falling 150 feet at Turner Field? That’s the kind of death you want to avoid. Drowning while drunk. Freezing to death while zonked out. Drug overdose. Choking on vomit. Death while drag-racing on a public street. A fall while screwing around on stairs at a ballgame or trying to reenact something Jackass might have tried.

That’s the stuff you don’t want to do. It’s a stupid waste. It’s the sort of waste that can never be explained away or made sense of by your survivors.  The waste that leaves you, the dead guy, and your friends and relatives open, justifiably, to mockery.

“Dope! What was he thinking? Had it coming to him.”

It puts you in an almost Darwinian equation. “A guy that stupid … probably just as well he’s gone. It’s nature’s way of weeding him out of the gene pool.”

Young men are particularly susceptible to “dying stupidly”. There’s that whole immortality of the young thing, a predilection to take risks, the real chance of being drunk or stoned … and you mix them together and you suddenly are a strong candidate to be part of that 1 percent. (A stat I just made up but seems about right.)

You never want to be an example of what not to do. Your parents didn’t raise you for that.

So before you start screwing around on the escalators at a ballpark, ask yourself this: Could this lead to a stupid death? If so, back off, son. Don’t be part of that 1 percent.