We have a new candidate!

Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Luckiest MotherF****r on Earth, a mystery never fully explained.

We have a new candidate for the position of Luckiest MotherF****r on Earth.

In order for you to fully appreciate this, I would like you to step into the shoes of TLMFOE. Come with me for a trip down a road that will use up eight of your nine lives and cause the ninth to crap its pants.

It's 9:00 on a Friday night. You are a middle-aged redneck. You have been drinking with your 2 best buddies for the last couple of hours, and now that the case and a half of Natural Ice is gone, you look for something else productive to do.

As you look around the trailer, your eyes alight upon your .38, sitting quietly up on the shelf in the corner. You think to yourself, "Self, that poor gun looks awfully dirty from across the room with my drunk eyes. I think I should clean it this very instant."

*cue dramatic music*

You manage to remove the bullets without shooting anyone. Then you "clean the gun". You're still wearing your uniform from the tow company, might as well use the shirttail for something. Besides, who's gonna notice a little carbon on the shirttail? It'll look just like grease. And the grease that is already there will work as well as gun oil, right? Right.

2 minutes later your gun is "clean" and you reload the bullets.

*volume goes up on the dramatic music*

As you are walking across the trailer to put the gun back on the shelf, you trip and fall, as people that have consumed a 12-pack of beer are wont to do. When the gun goes off and shoots out the TV that your buddies are watching, they turn around to cuss you out, and realize that you're laying on the floor semi-comatose, bleeding profusely from the front of your head.

Now, since you were the smartest of the three, and you're now out of commission, there is no one left to think, "Hey, we should call an ambulance!" But your buddy Jim-Bob, he's pretty smart, too, and he thinks, "Hey, we need to get our buddy to the Hospital!"

So they load you up in your tow truck, which is the only vehicle that has enough gas to get to town, because gas is 3 bucks a gallon now, so who the hell can afford it? And since Bubba drives the most sober-like when he's drunk, he gets behind the wheel.

We can skip ahead to the ER, since by some miracle, Bubba didn't kill anyone on the way in.

Bubba pulls up into the ambulance bay, because tow trucks are kinda like ambulances for sick cars, right? He runs in the front door of the ER and screams something incoherently in drunk redneck dialect at the clerk at the front desk, of which she catches "shot in the head" and screams incoherently in freaked-out unit secretary dialect into the radio something including the words "shot in the head".

A bunch of gung-ho trauma junkies rush out to the truck. You are sprawled in the seat moaning, with a blood-soaked towel to your head. You are holding the towel. You don't realize it, but this is not a normal thing. Normally, GSWs to the head don't hold their own towel.

The trauma-junkies unload you onto a gurney, and wheel you into our trauma bay, where I'm moving the previously "sickest patient in the ER" to a different slot in the corner, since she is no longer the "sickest patient in the ER". As we wheel by you, she says to me, "Jesus! I'm glad I'm not him!" with a pause between every word, since she can't breathe too well, hence the previously held title.

You are now awake and talking to the 500 people who are teeming about you (because everyone always runs for the trauma), so I get to listen to your story from next door where I am taking care of the woman who gave you her room.

When you say the words, "I was just cleaning my gun and it went off," she and I look at each other and start laughing hysterically, which was OK for me, but not so OK for her, because then she started coughing and couldn't stop, and then RT glared at me, but then she coughed up a nasty lung booger, and RT was happy because the Doc had ordered a culture and she hadn't coughed a good one up yet, and... wait, where was I?

Oh yeah. You told everybody that you were just cleaning your gun and it went off.

At this point, I can tell the crowd has started to disperse next door, so I mosey in to check you out. You are an idiot with a bloody face. We start a couple of big IVs on you, clean up your face a little so we can see your boo-boo, and send you off to radiology.

And here is where you can step out of bloody, drunk idiot's shoes and just be yourself again. Look, you just gained 50 IQ points and you're sober! (Well, some of you.)

Now, take your index finger and put it right between your eyebrows. Now take that finger and trace it directly under your eyebrow, along the ridge of your orbit, to your temple. You have just traced the path that the bullet took on its way from the gun to the TV. Actually, it started at the temple.

When he gets back from radiology we pull up his films and find that he has...... a soft tissue injury.

The ophthalmologist comes in and checks out his eye and finds no problems. He sews up the 3 inch gash and all of a sudden he looks like a guy with a black eye and a couple of stitches. Well, more than a couple. But he looks like he got hit with a fist, not a bullet.

A fraction of an inch difference in the trajectory of the bullet and there would have been a big hole in his head and grey matter on the remains of the TV. Instead, he gets to spend the rest of his life reminding his drinking buddies that he is one of the Luckiest MotherF****rs on Earth.