Polo. Superman. Snake Food. Sick Celebrities. Pigs and Flowers.

--A man rides his horse into a game of polo. In the heat of the battle, he is knocked to the ground, and he is injured. The horse, fortunately, is not. The man becomes obsessed with healing. He is a rich man, as we know from the fact that he owns a horse. It should be mentioned, that in all likelihood he treated the horse fairly well. One would not assume he has the horse shot or otherwise punished, although that is a possiblity.

In any case, the rich and now injured man begins paying people to inflict on rats and mice and monkey injuries similar to the one that he has received during that game of polo. He hopes that if these injuries are studied and played with enough, somebody, someday, will find the way to make him well again.

Incidentally, isn’t it a fine thing to be human and have all these choices? The horse, for example, didn’t choose to play polo, but was chosen as a polo stead. Naturally that rats and mice and monkey did not choose to play polo and fall or be knocked from a horse; nor did they choose to partake of the mans desire to have himself healed. They received their injuries by blows of hammer and cuts of scalpel.

The man was not only rich, but he was quite well known. Using his name and his finances, he begin eloquently demanding that other people donate money for projects in which rats and mice and monkey would have injuries inflicted on them and then have those injuries studied, so that someday, the rich and well known man can be un-injured again.

He is looked at as something of a hero. He is called courageous. Incidentally, most polo players are.

Within a year after the man received his injury while playing polo, the number of rats and mice and monkeys that are injured by hammers and scalpels quadruples. It is hard to make significance of numbers that in the high millions. Going from one broken and dead to ten is shocking; going from twenty million to eighty is not.

In any case, if there is a heaven, and if it lets in the little animals, its gates are flooded with the souls of broken backed mice, rats, and monkeys.

The man’s injuries are not healed.

Eventually, he dies too. And another soul goes sucking up into the sky.

--It is easy to mourn the death of Superman. It is hard to mourn the death of Christopher Reeve.

--Speaking of rats, an ex-student (JM) who meant to feed a baby rat to his snake, faced the ultimate dilemma. How can you take care of both the snake and its meal at the same time? I suggested he cut off a finger and feed it to the snake. He thought I was kidding. I was.

A toe is a much easier thing to live without.

Interestingly absurd scenario: a man who wants to feed the snake flesh but doesn’t want to sacrifice any living thing to it. He begins to grow himself by eating large quantities of grains and tofu. Soon, he is dripping in extra flesh. He is his own little farmer working the body of his own little farm of fat.

Once a week or so, he performs the little operation of removing a strip. Perhaps the snake needs some thrill of hunt, and so the man must tie a piece of string through a hole he pokes in the hunk of flesh and then drag it around the cage in front of the snake.

--Strangers things have happened. There was that man in Germany who put an ad on the net stating he wanted to kill and eat somebody. Mad world indeed.

--Madder yet, there was the man who answered the ad. And who allowed himself to be killed and eaten.

--Celebrities who have sicknesses they did not inflict on themselves and who support humane research that does not involve animals: Richard Pryor; Michael J Fox; Montel Williams; Berke Breathead.

--JM, incidentally, did not feed that particular rat to his snake. Nor, as far as I can tell by looking at him, has he cut off anything.

The rat, a female, he’s named Herbert, and he is raising her. I know for a fact that she’ll be a good friend. Her hair has just come in and her eyes have just opened and you should see her drink with her little fingers holding the end of the eye dropper.

--In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez writes about the Vicario brothers, pig butchers who name their pigs, but only after flowers, for if they give them human names, it becomes impossible to slide the knife.