I died in Chile, it was a terrible accident involving a red cobra and some armed assault to a brothel which I just happened to be nearby. My funeral involved lots of people I never knew, some others who promised they would never see me again, and of course, my beloved family: My daughter and her dog. It wasn't very emotional, some few people that thought they knew me said a few things about my love for my career, my altruism and my wisdom. And said those things knowing I had always hated the insurance business, and the last charity related thing I did was to steal a sandwich from a kid in some volunteer kitchen.

The last years of my life were just working, getting people into buying useless insurances and sharpening pencils. As a matter of a fact my whole life could've been written in a napkin if only I hadn't retire for 3 years to travel around the world. I was around forty at the time and had never used all the accumulated vacation time I had build for years, so since I had nothing to live for, I just took off. I decided my first travel would be to London. But soon after a few minutes of some sort of research, I found out I wasn't wallet-a-lly prepared for that kind of trip. So I saved some cents, left my child with her mother and went to Peru.

I'm really not sure why had I gone there, now I think about it, I believe the name was just too catchy, and so I traveled the jungles of the wild South America, which I think is called wild for the amount of times one can get mugged in one day. But the most interesting things about that, were the jungles and rain forests. I had a few guides show me the area, and it was really beautiful, they were long and tiring walks, and the weather was always humid, but it was all worth it.

It was in a Bolivian jungle where I was fascinated by them, their textures, their colors and their loud silence. Of course I had seen hem before in zoos back at Chicago, but it was just not comparable. I could never describe the feeling of watching all those snakes creeping to the moonlight. Ever since then I have been serpentophilic, not in a sick sex twisted way, more in a I'll-investigate-all-I-can kind of way.

Eventually and along with my trips I became an expert in those backbone-less reptiles. I still don't know why I liked them so much, but I did. And so I dedicated for almost two years to live the dream I never had, living in jungles and studying stations to be around them. It was a weird fixation, but I was happy, more happy than in all those years of hard work.

But as every happy phase, it had to come to an end. The time was over, and I didn't have the money or the balls to stay there, to throw away that systematized life and live as I wanted. So I went back to selling insurances, but the problem wasn't the fact that I was back, the problem was that I had gone to a happier place. Nothing was the same, my cold blood indifference was no longer useful. The coffee didn't taste the same from a machine, the air smelled always like something in between dead dreams and smog, and now I could notice how boring was my job. But I stayed, I didn't knew how could I get out, and now I think about it, it was more that I didn't want to get out.

So years went on, but I was still dead inside. Then Raul Called, he was one of the biologists that studied the snakes along with me, and he told me they had found something they had been looking for for ages. The red Brazilian cobra, which happened not to be precisely in Brazil. But the point was that, I couldn't go, or at least so I thought. But then I looked back to what I would leave. A crappy job which I hated, and a daughter who I never saw, and of course, her dog. So, with the same boldness I took those prolongued vacation, I took off to Brazil.






By I'm the penguin