This whole Burmese python business

So I'm sitting upstairs, eating a bit of lunch, watching Morning Joe on tape, avoiding going downstairs to paint Tim Geithner, the doing of which, as noted previously, is not going well.  This whole painting business is currently a massive black hole.  A massive fucking black hole.  I don't want to talk about it.

Anyway, so there I'm sitting.  If you were somehow able to rip the top of my apartment off and stare down at me from, say, a blimp, I'd be sitting on what, given the right orientation, would be the bottom left of a slightly rectangular room.  On the upper right corner, catty corner, which I feel certain isn't how you spell that, is the door to the bathroom.  My reckoning is that from where I'm sitting on the sofa to the opposite corner of the room is somewhere between 18 and 22 feet.  I mean, who really measures?  This is merely an approximation; an attempt to quantify in your mind the lay of the land.

Excellent Morning Joe, by the way.  This Ryan guy has everyone apoplectic.

I can barely function, just thinking about it.
Me neither.

Anyway, across the bottom of the screen little bits of news from around the world are being horizontally scrolled.  Up pops one.  It reads:

"Seventeen foot Burmese python found in Everglades"

Really.  Really?  Seventeen feet?  That's a massive fucking snake.

Me?  I have a shark phobia.  I love to swim in the ocean and am generally comfortable doing so.  But if I find myself a bit too far out from the shore, to the point where I can't feel the bottom with my feet during the lulls between the waves, I become anxious.

Anxious of what?
Of what?  That's your question?  Of what?
Yes.  Of what are you anxious?
Sharks, man!  I open the paragraph by saying I had a shark phobia, then I start talking about swimming in the ocean, then I discuss anxiety, and you can't do that math?
Hmmm.  I suppose, put that way, laid out in a neat linear fashion, that I should have guessed.
Okay.
Okay.

Just so it's clear, dear reader, I experience shark-related anxiety when my feet can't touch the ocean floor.  Oddly, if I'm snorkeling or diving (I've only scuba dived twice, but still), it doesn't bother me. But in the cold, dark Atlantic...

Brrrrrr.

So I'm sitting looking at the distance between me and the bathroom door a moment ago and imagining that space filled to near capacity with 17 feet of Burmese python and let me tell you, I'm totally getting the heebie-jeebies.  Heebie-jeebies, by the way, is what's called a reduplicated phrase.  Interesting little article here.  Boogie-woogie is another.

Which of course makes me think of this:

To this day I can't decide whether I like this guy (Mondrian) or not.  So I have anxiety about that as well.

I think a snake that big could, by utilizing its excellent detachable jaw, eat me whole.

I was texting a friend of mine after the golf, talking about how lovely it would be to own one of those houses that abut the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island.  My comment to my friend went something like "I'd love to own one of those houses, but I'd be afraid that an alligator would eat my dog."

To which he responded "That would be a legitimate concern, but only if you have an actual, not an imaginary, dog."

Easy for him to say.  He's got a nice little white dog.

Me?  I want to get a redbone coonhound, but I'm having trouble resolving riding my bike to Miami with dog ownership.

This, of course, is a gag.  The real ones look like this:

O' noble beast.

Important update:  This is a picture of the python in question:

I'm feeling less threatened.  My vision of a 17-foot snake was much thicker than what appears to be the reality.  Bottom line:  It could still kill me, when push came to shove, but I don't think it could eat me.  Which is the part I'm worried about--being half awake and half dead and being eaten alive.   Brrrrr.

But it could sure as hell eat my dog.