re: #484 Varek Raith

Choking on food is probably a terrible way to die, because I know from experience that you feel so unbelievably stupid while you’re choking.

Once upon a time, I came freakishly close to death from a spoonful of Grape Nuts cereal. Grape Nuts can’t really be enjoyed when it’s still completely crunchy. It’s like eating tiny rocks at that point. If it soaks in milk too long, however, it becomes a terrible slurpy porridge, and unless you are the type who likes cold oatmeal, that’s just no good at all. In between those two poles is a particular Grape Nuts texture that’s still somewhat solid and chewy.

The downside is that it compacts like nature’s own caulking material. And so it was that one day, I was mindlessly ingesting some of this stuff, and SOMEHOW managed to get a big clump of it lodged in my trachea. This illustrates the bad design whereby we eat through the same hole from which we breathe. My ability to inhale or exhale just ceased. It’s truly amazing how rapidly you revert to animal instincts when you suddenly find yourself unable to breathe. Yet, I still managed to notice how ridiculously absurd it was that I, the contemporary iteration of an unbroken chain of life traceable all the way back billions of years to the first self-replicating molecule, all my ancestors having survived disease, plague, famine, predators, lightning strikes, war, accidents, and all of the other uncountable ways you can die, was about to be done in by a tiny little glorp of food, which was ironic considering I needed food to live.

I was really, seriously, fer-real close to losing consciousness, and had I done so, that would have been that. Somehow I finally managed to cough it out, and thusly I remain here to pollute the internets with my presence.