There comes a time in a man's life when he finally has a chance to really connect with his roots, his primal urges, his basest of hunting and gathering notions, latently passed down from generation to generation, and he gets to hack another living thing to death. Yesterday was such a day.

The day started out simple enough, I dealt with color correction issues for PDF files at a printer in Singapore (stupid global economy), preflighted some artwork, had lunch at Moe's. Nothing out of the ordinary. Erin and I were on our way home and my friend Ray was on his way over to watch Kill Bill Volume 1 on the widescreen with us. Erin got home a few minutes before me, called me on my cell phone, and asked "Do we have an axe?" Not really knowing what to say I asked the obvious question, "Why the heck do you need an axe?" She countered with the fact that when she opened up her garage door a snake had crawled into the garage. A big snake. At least 3 feet long she said. And she wanted to kill it. I had my doubts about the size of the snake and told her that all we had was a shovel and that she could use that. I also said I'd be home in two minutes if she would just wait. She said the snake was between her and the shovel and that she would go in through the house and grab the shovel that way.

I got home and parked the car and saw the craziest thing I've ever seen: My lovely fiancee wielding, well more like swinging, a shovel violently in the yard, overhead. I looked down and saw the snake - it was about a 4 foot long black snake - a water moccasin (aka cottonmouth). She was actually under-exaggerating the size of the beast! It was slithering towards the drainage fence between the houses and Erin was flailing away at it. I grabbed the other shovel and headed back for it but it went under a fence and we couldn't get to it. Erin said she got it on the tail but didn't get a really good hit on it. We went over and talked to our neighbors across the street who saw the whole thing and assured them that we were not crazy. Then I went into the backyard to put up our garden hose and looked over into our neighbor's yard. The snake was back. It had crawled right up to their back patio right next to their sliding glass door. I thought of the little kids that live next door, of our puppy dog, and the fact that this was a venomous snake - I couldn't let this thing live. I grabbed the shovel and ran to kill it, but thought to myself that the sight of your next door neighbor (who you've really only talked to once in your life) in your backyard thrashing a shovel into the ground might be a disturbing sight and pretext to call the police. So I knocked on their door to tell them what was going on. They weren't home so I decided to go ahead and handle up on the snake. I got a few hits on it with the shovel but now it was coiled up trying to strike me - water moccasins are a tad poisonous - so I backed off. Just then I saw my friend Ray pull up. I grabbed the other shovel and handed it to him and said we had some business to tend to. He was of course a little taken back as he didn't know what was going on. I explained the size of the snake and we proceeded to go to the backyard of my next door neighbor and he too was shocked at the size of this pit vipor. So we took turns distracting it and hacking away at it. It was resting on the plastic splashblock that goes under the gutter to keep the water away from the foundation of the house and we probably hit it a good 15 times. Ray finally delivered a vicious blow and blood splattered out onto the splashblock. The snake stayed coiled back with his mouth open trying to strike at us but finally after enough blows he decided he should just slither away. He tried and I delivered the death blow, knocking its head off. The damn snake was still moving after he died, which is just freaky.

It took some time for Ray and I to come down off our adrenaline rush. We had that sense of manliness that must inevitably accompany the hacking and thrashing of something and high-fived each other for our efforts. Erin brought a plastic lawn bag out and we threw our prey into the bag and dumped it in the trash can. Then we left a note on our neighbor's door explaining why their splashblock was shattered to pieces and covered in blood, just in case they were curious. We then proceeded to watch Kill Bill Volume 1 to round out what has to be the most violent day of our lives.

This morning I went and knocked on our next door neighbor's door to make sure they had gotten the note. The neighbors are a nice Asian couple with two kids but they don't seem to speak English that well. It felt odd explaining to this woman that I had hacked and killed a creature on their back patio yesterday. Really odd. I don't think there's really any way to pull that off successfully, with the language barrier and all. If we see a "For Sale" sign on their house in the near future I guess I won't be too surprised.