I live in the city of New York. Brooklyn actually, off of Union Ave in Carroll Gardens. Its posh. I am not posh. I am as far from the upper middle class as a person can get. I can only claim this perch because luckily I met a women who made all the right life decisions. I of course have a track record of making wrong decisions, evident in my choice of degree, professional direction and up until a cold day in February long ago, romantically. So basically every decision I could make has proven itself wrong, except she.
This story isn't about me though. I mention New York only because of all the strange ways people can die here.
The famous story of window washer falling tens of stories, and surviving only because he fell on and crushed a random person walking along the sidewalk.
A group of happy-go-lucky pedestrians crossing a regular street in mid-town, probably heading home or to work or to get wasted or some such trivial thing and getting blown to pieces by a steam vent exploding under their feet.
I can’t help but thinking about news eve celebrations where people shoot guns into the air. Those bullets come down and blamo someone’s dead, randomly. Happened in Ohio to Amish girl. Some dude accidental discharged a rifle into the air. Enter stage right: Deadly head wound.
All chaos theory at its finest. A zig instead of a zag and life could have continued.
Crazy shit.
None of those deaths are as interesting though as the Chinese lady who wanted some rice wine to aid with her rheumatism.
According to the article I guess its an ancient homeopathic remedy to add a secret ingredient to the wine. Secret ingredients aren’t usually this bizarre though. She chose to drink rice wine flavored with the “corpse” of a cobra. Yep that’s right a hood sprawled fang extended reptile of poisonous reputation. As i am reading along I think why not, when in Rome and all. How bad could it be.
Whatever, right? It’s just a decoration, or at worst, a flavoring.
Not so in the case of our Chinese heroines death.
For three months her snake waited to be freed. Submerged in rice wine it watched as shoppers came and went without picking its vintage, until one day, she came and picked it up, put her money on the counter and walked out of the store looking to make her joint pain feel better after a guzzling some decaying snake parts.
Boom, out pops the venomous pretender. All along it was just waiting for random person number 1 with swollen joints to imbibe on its homeopathic deliciousness.
When I read this story I immediately scrolled down to the comments.
There, as one should expect in every comment section, was an ongoing argument.
Animal cruelty versus killing an animal for food.
Not one person even mentioned the obvious issue here.
How the fuck can a snake be a live after being bottled up in a batch of rice wine for three months. I mean come the fuck on. If this was a movie who would believe that as a plot twist. Little dude just waiting for the top to pop.
If this was an isolated incident than maybe you could say that was one lucky snake. Magical and patient.
But snakes have been popping out of these wine bottle for years. Well, at least three times before this poor lady gets bit, the article mentions this as fact.
I like to believe it.
In dying I guess the promise of cured rheumatism was met.
In the end what I take from this article is that of all the possible accident deaths that await me in my little section of the world, I can be aware if I ever find myself thirsty in china and spot a bottle of rice wine with a snake inside I am best off assuming that mother fucker is alive. Better believe I am going leave it on the shelf.
