Three fates worse than death (Or worse than giving birth to octuplets anyway)

Have you ever heard of arachibutyrophobia? Neither did I, until very recently. It’s an official phobia, so it must be shared by a good number of people, if not necessarily a very sane group of people. So, arachibutyrophobia is the more than somewhat irrational fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.

You’d have to say that if that were the biggest worry in your life, you would have not all that much reason to complain. Which leads us - more stickily than seemlessly, perhaps - to the following.

No doubt, by now you will have heard about that American woman, who’s given birth to octuplets - a word that, rather stupidly, inspires visions of a tired new mother, holding up a box, filled with wriggling octopi…

Anyway, I was thinking: What can be worse than delivering eight bloody babies in a row? As a man, I’m not in the greatest position to judge but they always say that giving birth can be one of the most painful experiences anyone ever goes through - anyone not acquainted with one or more of the world’s many state-sponsored torture rooms, that is - so giving birth to eight in one go must be pretty bad.

So, always prepared to spend some time on idle thought & speculation, I tried to come up with a list of other, pretty damn bad things that could happen to people. In Victorian novels rape was always referred to as ‘a fate worse than death.’ I have no wish to debate such matters here, so I would simply like to come to a short list of things that could be considered to be ‘a fate worse than octuplets’.

There are a few obvious contenders:

1) To be a secret agent who’s appointed to guard US presidential candidates. It’s bad enough that, in a worst case scenario, you would have to be prepared to give your life in order to save a bloody politician but it’s a fate far worse than having octuplets to have to attend each and every political rally, where you will be forced to listen to the same speeches and the same jokes, over and over and over again, until the end of the election season.

2) To be a conspiracy theory fact finder - which probably comes as close to being a contradictio in terminis as you will ever find but imagine yourself to be one of those people who will watch obsessively every ‘new’ bit of footage of those planes flying into those towers, who will read any new ‘fact’ that appears anywhere on the WWW and who then will have to go out and claim that, despite all these millions of images and articles that are out there, there is this vast conspiracy to hide these depressingly highly accessible images & articles from the people at large. A fate worse than octuplets for anyone who’s still on nodding acquaintances with sanity - which is why you have these little plaques in conspiracy theorists’ offices, which read, “You DO have to be crazy to work here but it doesn’t help”.

3) To be Oprah. Sure, she’s richer than the average oil exporting country, more powerful than most world leaders and better looking than the Pope but her job is worse than wiping roadkill from a dead Hell’s Angel’s hairy bottom. She has to smile politely when people come to talk about yet another Godawful self-help book. She has to pretend to actually like all these terrible, self-obsessed people, like Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise or Sylvester Stallone’s mad mum - and, to top that, she has had to live through all these awful, interminable television years, suffering the indignity of having the whole world watching her painfully public struggle to avoid becoming a very undesirable mix of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, by not becoming the first black American Michelin woman. Now, there’s a fate truly worse than giving birth to octuplets. Hell, it’s worse than delivering eight fully grown octopi, I’d say.

So, those were the first three (fit to print) ideas I had of things that are worse than giving birth to octuplets. If you have any other and/or better ideas, I’d be very happy to read them and go ‘Ouch!’.

(Fat chance - Or: On a slippery slope in a handcart to Hell…)