deux

No shit, there I was all snuggled into bed, reading Laurel K. Hamilton's Bloody Bones with the TV tuned to Discovery. The volume was fairly low so as not to wake my sleeping sweetie. She, unlike me, can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I, on the other hand, am up half the night unable to sleep for whatever reason. At any rate, I was reading while commercials were on, and watching about the deadliest snakes in the world.

Now I don't like snakes. They are slithery and cold and you can always seem them plotting the death of some thing behind their beady little eyes. I won't go so far as to say that snakes are evil - they're just animals, after all. But they are a head full of schemes wrapped in a tight, limbless coil. Icky.

I'd already seen the fer de lance, the king cobra, the western diamondback, and the roger's viper. The host was on to tracking down a wild black mamba. Apparently black mambas are "excitable" and "easily angered." They're also a milky white. The black comes from the insides of their mouths, which are darker than a Republican's heart. They're exceedingly deadly, too. Their poison will kill an adult within 20 minutes if not treated immediatley. They're also really fucking fast for a snake, and spend most of their time in trees, waiting to drop on their next meal.

See? Told you they were schemers.

Anyway, show host and his assistant were trying to get a less-than-pleased black mamba out of the tree. And the thing was almost too quick for them. Either that, or it had recently bathed in Astroglide, as they couldn't seem to keep the snake from slipping out of their catch pole things. Eventually they got it out of the tree it was in, and onto the ground. That's when it reared back and struck at the camera in super slo-mo. Two angry looking fangs jutted from it's blackened upper jaw, filling up the screen of my tv one agonizing frame at a time...

*SNAP*

The power goes out.

"HOLY FUCK!!!"

I think I jumped 8 feet off the bed. My girl slept right through, oblivious to all in her slumber. I have no idea what happened to the cameraman. All I know is that the last image I saw before everything got dark was an angry black mamba trying to bite my face off.

I don't like snakes.