Oh my god! There were snakes! And they swarmed! And bit his face! My stomach hurts from me freaking the heck out right now!

Stupid Lonesome Dove. Crossing the river and then there wasn't just one water moccasin, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a swarm in the middle of the river and they attack, viciously without recourse. What is that?! I'm so disturbed by this that I'm having to abuse exclamation points and share my pain in hopes that I will be able to sleep tonight. This is bothering me even more than Snakes on a Plane. I was ready for snakes in a movie like Snakes on a Plane, but Lonesome Dove, maybe I expected doves, maybe I expected to be lonesome on occasion, but nobody said anything about swarming snakes attacking doves who are alone. I was not warned by the title, there was no foreshadowing of what was to come. Instead it was a sweet Irish kid, afraid to cross a river, and me gently mocking him from my air mattress. And then he's in the water and then...

I think I'm suffering from post-traumatic stress. Did you know I hate snakes?

I don't know where this phobia comes from. I've had it as long as I can remember. In fact, while living in Jacksonville (so I was under two) I refused to get in the plastic backyard pool (you know the circular plastic ones that held around five gallons of water?) because the hose looked like a snake to me. The only thing holding this fear at bay was because at some point in my childhood when we visited the Children's Museum in Indianapolis there was always a snake available to pet. So long as I forced myself to touch the snake I was okay. The first year there wasn't snake for me to pet my phobia started to spiral out of control. Now I'm left pacing the floor and checking my bed when I see snakes on t.v. attack unsuspecting Irishmen.

Snakes are, in fact, the only nightmare I suffer from. I don't really have nightmares per say; on occasion I have disturbing dreams or unsettling dreams but it is rare that I feel the all encompassing terror of the nightmares I suffered as a child. Those nightmares, of course, were due mostly to U.S.A. Up All Night and the silly monster movies I would sneak downstairs to watch after my parents went to bed. But the snake dream, that is something else altogether. There are always snakes everywhere, slithering, hissing, coiled, and laying, and it is always the same house, standing alone in the middle of a wasteland also covered with snakes. Sometimes I manage to keep all the snakes outside, but usually they are all trapped in a cupboard and someone sets them free--right after I tell them not to. But even with all of that I get along with the snakes, by mid-dream I'm handling the phobia. It's not fun, but I'm not scared either. And that's usually when the bad snake shows up.

Red and white candy-cane striped, this snake is a mix between an anaconda and one of Ridley Scott's aliens. It's huge, it's mean, and it hates me. And it is always extremely poisonous and capable of constricting. Obviously my sub-conscious likes for my monsters to come fully prepared to deal slow, painful deaths in multiple ways. Inevitably the snake and I fight and while I don't die I'm always hurt and it's always a horrifically torturous experience made worse by the knowledge that had someone listened to me it would all have been avoidable. I hate this snake, and because of him, I hate all snakes.

Joy Harjo, a fantastic poet, relates the night she met the spiritual representation of her feminine self. She awoke to find a giant cobra looming over her, but she wasn't scared. She recognized the cobra as a spirit animal, the energy of her femininity being expressed to her. If my spirit animal is a snake I am completely screwed and doomed to unenlightenment. If I wake up to a giant cobra looming over there will be screaming, there might be bed-wetting, and there will be freak-the-heck-outting, but there will be no spiritual enlightenment. And really, I'd like to think that unless my femininity hates me with the firey passion of a thousand suns, that it would pick some other shape to take, like a three-toed sloth, or maybe a lemur.

I know what you're thinking. Aren't you a spiritualist? Don't you love and respect Nature in all that it is? Yes I am, and yes I do, but I simply can't handle the snake. I respect its right to slither along its happy way; I respect its right to sun on rocks far, far away from me when I go hiking in the desert. I even respect its right to inhabit the Mississippi--though I do question its intelligence in that decision. But I don't need to love it, or like it, or romanticize it. The snake represents so many things and many of them are not negative. I've worked so hard to come to peace with this fear and the sad thing was, I thought I was getting better. Who knew Lonesome Dove was going to rock my world. Certainly I wasn't expecting any life-altering scenes when I bought it cheap.

It was the last shot when they showed the snake, jaws fully distended biting old dude right on the cheek. He was flailing in the water, dying slowly, snakes biting him, coiled around his arms, legs, torso, and neck, and there was the one, attached to his face, pumping him full of venom. It just seems like a bad way to die. A really, really bad way to die.

I hate snakes.