Instructions For Choking on Your Own Tongue

With something of nutritional value, or psychological dependency, in one hand,

use the jaw’s muscles to open mouth and use the other hand to keep the mouth open,

take the almond, or pumpkin seed, or small, blue (or white or pink or any other color) pill and place it in the open mouth,

if it’s an almond or pumpkin seed or genetically modified beef or anything else that falls under the category of Food, then chew. chew. chew. mash up into tiny fragments. swallow. (Don’t choke.)

if it’s some sort of prescription pill with someone else’s name on the bottle, swallow. (Don’t choke.)

For Food – let stomach acid digest and do nothing. Nine times out of ten it won’t be food.

For a pill – Wait anywhere from half an hour to an hour and feel high, the chemistry of the human body tells the brain it’s feeling pleasantly altered within (usually). If no fuzzy feeling rushes through the head or spine then: 1. someone got burned, or 2. one pill wasn’t enough. Take more, or, if burned, use violence.

Violence is either always or never the answer.

Open mouth again, high or not, and stick fist into it.

Snap jaw shut. In one scenario, the fist flies out of the mouth fearing for its safety – the tip of the tongue suffers the bite, blood vessels explode, tendons snap – “Fuck.” In another scenario, fist gets bit, bur nerves light up with pain and fist pulls out of mouth before serious damage is done. This time.

Scenario 1 ends like this…

Missing tip of tongue makes speaking next to impossible and so, with this new inability, there were no verbal missteps.

No confrontation,

No misinterpretation,

Safe and stripped of pertinent experiences for better, and for worse.

Lonesome, but free of enemies. Free of friends. Free to use a computer, free to order a black handgun, free to unload when all hope is lost.

A gushing hole in the head.

Scenario 2:

No lesson was learned, the point was completely missed:

“You’ve gotta learn to put your foot in your mouth sometimes,” this line came through the other end of the phone, a half-obsolete cell phone with practically no service, just unclear enough to morph “foot” into “fist.”

Sarcasm and satire are greatly underappreciated

also largely unnoticed.

With no damage to the tongue, speaking continues to go off without a hitch.

A dark bar finds a fist with teeth imprints high off some downer and holding a beer,

The game of pool that had been going for some eternity (picture five minutes painstakingly dragging by) finally ends.

The teeth-imprinted hand grabs a pool stick and tries to talk someone into joining, the charisma of talking, nobody wanted to play, egotistical, masculinity-belittling comment, angry stranger overreacts, he was an ex-con, flash of a pistol, loud blast, ears ring, body abruptly collapses to the ground, the jaw’s clenched so tightly then that the tongue is severed.