I hate snakes.  I think they’re terrifying.  I’ve always been afraid of snakes.  My parents think it’s funny.  They forced us to camp when my brother and I were younger — they thought it was fun — and almost the entire time we were away, I would be scouring the campground for snakes. (Or I would be heating up my cordless curling iron that I made my mother buy me to keep my hair in tip top shape anywhere and any place. Basically, I wasn’t really a good camper.)

Because I’m so afraid of snakes, I find them everywhere.  They follow me. It’s like I’m the Pied Piper of snakes.  My mortal fear of slithering things, makes them come towards me, rather than away.  I remember looking out the window of our first house (the log cabin), when I was in first grade.  A king snake that was like 6 feet long was slithering down the path.  I screamed at the top of my lungs.  My mother came running — only to tell me that was our neighbor’s pet snake and not to overreact.  No big deal.  A 6 foot snake slithering down the path is just no big deal.  Every single day we lived at that house from then on out, I thought of that snake and was paranoid I’d see it again.  Luckily, I never did. But of course, I saw others.

I’m serious. That’s how often I thought of snakes when I was younger.  EVERY single day I worried that I’d run into one.  And often, I did.  Mostly, they were harmless (so they say) garden snakes.  But sometimes they were rattle snakes, which are a bit scarier to others as well.  One time I even found a dead baby snake in my bedroom.  I went up to my parents’ room that night screaming. My father didn’t believe me that there was actually a dead snake in my bedroom — and guess what?  There WAS.  I refused to sleep in there after that — and stayed in my brother’s room.  

My mother would lie to me when we went places and tell me that no snakes were around.  There always were.  Always.  I would catch her in her lies, and she would shrug and laugh.  I remember seeing a pipe fish in Hawaii and jumping up out of the water on top of my poor grandfather with a bad back.  I nearly killed the man.  And that pipe fish is the reason why I will never snorkel again.  

When I went hiking in Patagonia a few years ago, I remember asking our guide if there were any snakes — and he insisted there weren’t.  I actually thought for a minute that he had spoken to my mother before I left, and she had told him to lie to me about snakes.  But that didn’t happen.  There really aren’t snakes in Patagonia. At least, I didn’t see one.

There are snakes in Thailand. I saw some scary ass big snakes in Thailand.  They fall out of trees on you.  It’s horrible.  There are also snakes in Egypt.  Cleopatra died from one.  That is why I refused to go to Egypt as a child.  My mother really wanted the family to go. But I said no fucking way was I going to the land of the asps and cobras.

My friend Maria, the National Geographic Emerging Explorer (yes, she is very impressive), sees snakes all the time in the scary jungle-y rainforest places that she goes. She doesn’t mind. In fact, I think she might even like them.  It’s shocking to me that we remain such good friends to this day.  I really don’t approve of her approval of snakes. And I unfortunately will probably never visit her in her scary far off homes away from home.

I met a lady once in traffic school. She was doing a study of people who are afraid of snakes at Stanford University.  She had me come to her office so she could study my fear of snakes.  Apparently, I’m not all that bad on the snake fear richter scale.  Some people hate them more than me. 

I have so many snake stories.  I could go on and on.  I’m glad I live in NYC, where you only have to fear rodents.  They have legs, so they’re much less scary to me.  That being said, I do always look into the toilet to make sure that no water snake is trying to make his way into my home through the pipes……I think there’s probably a better chance that a rat might do that. But luckily, I’ve been spared from that happening thus far in my life.

BUT…. what I really wanted to convey tonight is not just how much I hate snakes. I just think it’s fucking nutso and insanely torturous that I now have a “snake” like shunt in my brain.  I mean — I have a fucking snake like pipe in my head that slithers down my neck and into my stomach.  What the fuck?  What did I do to deserve something in my body that resembles a snake!!!????

As I continue to relay the brain aneurysm stories, I will at some point transcribe the group texts of my friends while I was in the hospital.  I know there were a lot of texts where they talked about how pissed I was to have a brain shunt (and how pissed I was that no one would give me any wine).  When I got out of the hospital, I would sometimes just call or email someone (like my parents or Fucker or Cris) in the middle of the night in a complete panic over the concept of having a brain shunt.  A brain snake.  Named Gretchen.  I hate it.  I’m not sure I will ever not hate it.  I hate that I look in the mirror sometimes, and I can see that fucking snake like cord in my neck. Everyone else thinks it’s just one of those pop out veins — but I know it’s Gretchen the snake. I can feel it.  The worst part is Gretchen’s head, which is just above the right corner of my forehead.  It’s a big bulbous thing.  

Don’t ask me why I call it Gretchen. I just do. I remember telling Cris that I had named the brain snake, Gretchen.  It just stuck.

Yes.  I know YOU can’t see my brain snake.  But I CAN!!!!!! And you don’t have one! I do.  Bleh.

PS.  On a totally unrelated note, my yoga teacher today said that in his seven years of teaching, he has never worked at a studio like this one—where people aren’t afraid to sigh and moan so loud. So I was right!!!!!  My yoga studio does tend to have weirder people in it than most!!!

Slither ON!