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One day while I was sitting at this dive bar high on mushrooms, I got into watching a shitload of tweekers over at another table. Now I wouldn't normally know these were tweekers except that due to this little bump in awareness, I couldn't fucking help it. I especially got lost in watching the actions of one particular rot faced kid try to make a decision. Now, I imagine this whole process was happening pretty quick but from what I was looking at, the process was getting out of his seat and then doing this weird jerky shift in motion where he couldn't quite figure out what to do with himself. I swear this, the guy must've moved sixteen directions in five seconds without getting anywhere and then he rolled up his sleeve and showed off his new tattoo to his tweeker friends. This epic battle was a fight between the lizard brain and the cortex and in this case . . . lizard brain lost.

Rolling up the sleeves is just too complicated for a lizard brain. That dance of misdirection, that was all the evidence of a warm blanket of thought smothering a kick from the lizard inside. The kick was an impulse: a thing saying "I wanna fight wanna fuck wanna get out of this place wanna eat some meth" and human decorum slowed the thing down and said 'look at my new tattoo'. Civilization, conditioning and memory smothered that lizard like a wet blanket and left the entire action cuddly and warm, kind of like a cute alzheimers patient -- picture the grandmother from 'Mars Attacks' if this helps.

Ah humans! They're always up to doing shit like this, anthropomorhizing the beasts in the interest of lording their inflated cortexes above all the other animals in the menagerie. It is funny, really terribly funny. Maybe, if you'd like to interpret anything as the Komodo Dragon is killing you, why not believe they're motivated by envy of your ability to think abstractly. The Komodo dragon after all is a big lizard, one that can grow over ten feet long. It has huge flesh-ripping jaws and serrated needle sharp teeth instinctively guided by a lizard brain that's angling for every opportunity without regard for limits or ethics.

It kills by lurking along game paths and by waterholes, motionless and concealed in rocks or tall grasses. When an animal, any animal whatsoever, comes within a meter of the dragon, it lunges with blinding speed and can give chase at speeds of up to thirty five miles per hour. Large animals such as horses and goats are usually hamstrung by a bite from the jaws. If the animal goes down from the force of the initial attack, the Komodo Dragon will rush it, biting at the face and throat and making disembowling slashes with it's clawed feet.

If the human prey manages to stumble away from the attack, it may get to think for a while. Here is something you should think about following an attack from a Komodo Dragon.

In addition to not being picky about portions, the Komodo is even less discerning about condition. In actuality, the Komodo's preferred diet is the stinking rotting corpse of anything and has a highly developed sensory apparatus for finding a meal. Called the Jacobson's organ, this frilly area on the roof of the mouth cleans airborne particles of filth off the beasts yellow forked tongue then acts as chemical radar to locate meals from up to five miles away. If the Komodo was in Harlem and your rotting corpse was in a basement flat on Bleeker street, the Komodo would eventually come knocking if it weren't distracted by the numerous corpses around Times Square and Soho.

When the Komodo Dragon finds food, the bones, fur, hooves, skin, crushed brains and skull all go down equally. Even other smaller Komodo dragons that try getting in the way go into the adult Komodo's gullet. Weight varies, a Komodo Dragon that weighs a hundred fifty pounds before a meal can gorge itself into doubling it's weight following a meal. Not only can it consume this huge amount of meat in a single sitting, it can do this quickly, with a large specimen observed to eat an entire 70lb. pig in seventeen minutes. So ravenous an eater is this lizard that it will chew through it's own gums in the process of devouring a meal, making it the only animal thus far on the predators list that actually manages to eat some portion of it's own face with every meal.

Due to it's preference for carrion, the breath of the Komodo Dragon may get a bit foul. In addition to the chunks of decaying flesh that get lodged in the rows of regenerating needle like teeth, the Komodo's bleeding gums and flowing saliva create a festering stew of bacterial infection that drools in yellowing runners from the beast's mouth. As an adaption and a boon to predation, the Komodo Dragon is immune to infection by the septic bacteria that lives off the carrion and nutritious ooze supplied by it's horrid case of gingivitus.

You, as a weak human, are not immune to filth.

Fact of the matter is that as you stumble away from the attack, you are carrying within your bleeding wound at least one of fifty known forms of staph infection. This will finish the job that the Komodo Dragon started and even if you manage to stumble out of the three hundred yard range of the lizards vision and run for the hills, the lizard will be hopping along like Pepe LePue on the unseen trail created by the stink of your desperate, rapidly decaying flesh. The lizard on average, will walk eight miles a day to forage for meat. You, as carrion on the hoof, will be walking less than that and as the lizard catches up, it will harass you for the weakened piteful thing you are, until finally you fall. The big lizard then pads along to rake it's claws through your fluttering chest, it's complete victory over your precious cortex symbolized by your glazing stare as it turns you into a stinking litterbox.

Don't feel too bad. Horses and wild boar go down exactly the same. Size in this case really doesn't matter.

Now on to the meal. With the abdomen slashed and the intestines and stomach contents scattered, the scent of the kill attracts other Komodo's from across the island and a rudimentary socialization seems to occur. The Dragons loves to roll around in carrion, with heaven being nothing more that dipping into a gaseous bloating stew of your rotting organs. In fact, the only thing the Komodo dragon discards during the meal is the ungulate feces of an animal rich in digested plant products. Vegans take note: the discerning Komodo usually rips out the stomach and intestines of any animal it kills and puts these aside. Any young juveniles attracted to the smell from the kill will roll in the fecal matter like playful puppies in order to mask their scent from aggressive adults wishing to turn them into a meal. In this manner, the young sometimes manage to sneak away with tidbits of the corpse. Amid this orgy of rot, greedy consumption and salmonella -- opportunities for mating arise. Once sated with food, the lizards usually move on to these other drives provided by their streamlined brains.

Eventually, all flesh and clothing will be consumed with the only remnant of the kill being the film of blood and lizard drool where the body fell. Occasionally there may be some gnawed accessories on the periphery of the spot, half a camera perhaps. Meat is quickly processed in the digestive tract, with 85% of the meal converted into fat energy and water to be stored in the tail of the beast, the undigestible remainder excreted as bone powder and concentrated urea.

Komodo dragons do well in captivity. Since it lives on an island, it probably doesn't know enough to consider itself captive.

Speculation is that the Komodo Dragon is the closest analog to what Hunter Thompson was seeing at Circus Circus when he stumbled into the Sheriff's convention during Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Probably a literary muse or buried symbol of the Lizard Brain as a blind instrument of law and order, my guess is that reading about Komodo Island on Acid is a pretty inspiring accident. As an allegory on the american dream, these lizards may be unsurpassed . . . and we might do well to devote further study into their rapacious lifestyle -- from a distance greater than this.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

Because of this, and because it eats everything made out of meat. The Komodo Dragon is our official predator of the week until April 12, 2006.