I will admit to being somewhat of a macabre spirit. I’ve never had anyone very close to me die (aside from Grandma and she was quite old, lived far away, and had taken a vacation from her mind years earlier), so I fear the day that I will be faced with the awful news that someone I love more than anything on this Earth is gone.
The way I deal with this fear appears to be to think about death a lot. I think about my death, my husband’s death, my kids’, my mom’s, etc. etc. You get the idea. My husband and mother have voted and decided that I should take most of the time I spend worrying about deaths that have not yet occurred (and may not for another fifty years or more) and use it for more productive things. Like solving the World’s hunger crisis, or coming up with some alternative fuel for us to use in our gas guzzling Chevy.
Such is the life of an obsessive woman.
So here I am, a death obsessed chick, watching Animal Planet. And I see some factoid about how there are more deaths each year in Africa from hippos than from any other animal. Hippos? What the hell?! Everytime I go to the zoo and see one of those big, squishy, pink water pigs, I see a mouth full of peg teeth, about two inches high. They’re standing there in the water looking mostly comatose, and the zookeeper is tossing them heads of lettuce to eat. Lettuce? Doesn’t that mean they’re vegetarians? Weighing as much as a dumpster probably affects the speed at which they can run right? (not to mention that each of their legs is only about 12 inches long)
I mean, I’m no mathematician, but it’s not adding up for me. So as I was watching this show, I leaned in to take a closer look at these vicious monsters, and I noticed something funny. Hmmmm. How come the hippos in Africa have 18 inch long, pointy tusks for teeth instead of peg teeth like the hippos at the Buffalo zoo? Hmmmmmmm. Then it hit me. Those pansy zookeepers have been sawing off those fangs so they don’t become a statistic! (NY Times: “More zookeepers in the U.S. die from mauling by hippos than any other animal”)
Naturally I started thinking about how a hippo with really long, sharp, murderous tusks could do some serious damage to some poor fisherman who’s just trying to catch a minnow to eat in some sub-Saharan African river. And then I started thinking how pissed I’d be if I died in the mouth of a hippo.
I don’t know why, but I am going to have a huge problem with my Maker if I die in some freak accident. You’ve heard those stories; “Guy dies when anvil drops out of sky and lands on head, News at 11!“; or, “Woman drowns when car tips over in one foot of water and seatbelt traps her, Stay tuned!“; and even, “Jogger killed by mountain lion while running in Central Park, Channel 5 exclusive!“…that kind of stuff. I always read about those poor souls and think, “what the hell kind of cosmic karmic crap did they send around the world to have their lives ended with that kind of foolishness?” Please God do not let that happen to me! Or my mom! Or my husband! Or my kids! If it must be someone I know, let it be my step-mother! (Did I just say that out loud?)
Is it just me, or is anyone else out there going to be pissed if they die a hippo imposed death? I’m just wondering. Because if it’s just me, then I’ll just chalk it up to another Elleism. Sigh.
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