What does it take to put a snake down one’s throat?
Alcoholic Antic-of-the-Month
Story from “This is True” by Randy Cassingham, with his “tagline:”
“STUPID SERPENT SUCKER: Matt Wilkinson, 23, of Portland, Ore., describes himself as a ‘snake collector’. Several weeks ago he found a 20-inch rattlesnake and brought it home. After drinking a six-pack of beer, he was holding the snake when his ex-girlfriend, who was over for a party, saw it. “She said, ‘Get that thing out of my face’,” Wilkinson said. ‘I told her it was a nice snake. Nothing can happen. Watch,’ he said, as he stuck the snake into his mouth. But ‘it got ahold of my tongue,’ he said. As his tongue swelled up from the snake’s venom, nearly choking off his airway, his former girlfriend took him to the hospital. It had to be her, he admits, since ‘She was the only one sober’ enough to drive. What made him think he could get away with such a dangerous stunt? ‘You can assume alcohol was involved’ in his thinking process, he said. (Seattle Times) …Yes, we usually do.”
A recent article in The Mountain Enterprise of Frazier Park, north of Los Angeles, provides confirming evidence of this. Quoting from the April 2007 issue of the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, Anthony F. Pizon, MD wrote, “The most [common demographic to be bitten] is men intentionally handling snakes, and alcohol is frequently involved (emphasis added)…Not surprisingly, the upper extremity is the most common location for bites, followed by the lower extremity,” which supports the idea that people handling snakes comprise the majority of such incidents. Before we understood the fundamentals of alcoholism, we may have figured that snake bites resulting from sticking a snake down one’s throat or committing a burglary after skating on murder charges were caused by simple gross stupidity. Recalling that alcoholism causes egomania, which leads to a sense of invincibility often taking form in reckless behaviors (clue # 6 in the chapter, “A Supreme Being Complex,” in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics: Using Behavioral Clues to Recognize Addiction in its Early Stages), we may come to a different conclusion. It turns out that many if not most snake bites are caused by the same thing–the brain disease called alcoholism–responsible for the majority of “accidents” across the board.
(Story and tagline from “This is True,” copyright 2007 by Randy Cassingham, used with permission.)