The security guard caught a five-foot cobra past midnight last night. The neighbors killed it and placed it inside a plastic bag (in this country beset with other problems, who bothers to call the zoo, especially at that hour?). No wonder we haven't been seeing any rats and mice and cats and kittens lately. I suppose it was a choice between being endangered by the cobra or being endangered by everything else.

Whenever a man sees a snake his primal instinct is to kill it. I wonder what the archetypal events that resulted in this were. The contemporary atchay mentality seems to be "I will kill you because you represent everything else that killed everything I have ever loved."