Grant-funded Missing Men
As you all know, with the help of our generous donors, I have been studying the relationship between men, rats, hope, and arrogance, and have prepared a general overview of my findings. Before I go on, I’d like to acknowledge that this presentation should serve solely as a summary and not as a comprehensive disclosure of my study.
Men are, unquestionably, like rats, though we haven’t precisely identified all the ways in which this is true.
Rats swimming alone in a bucket of water require only 15 minutes to die; I confirmed this personally. However, if the rats are periodically held above the bucket to see what lies beyond, they will survive for an additional two days or so without rest. The entire scientific community has decided that this phenomenon is the result of hope, but I’d like to posit that it might instead be evidence of arrogance. Even though more rats are killed by humans than water, and we can kill them more quickly and painfully than drowning, these rats believe the same hand that suspends them above the bucket and then returns them to the water would obviously elect to save them. I have created a similar study of men to illustrate this position.
In order to do that, I had to examine lung capacity and physical strain in men—you’d agree that this is an appropriate and defensible avenue to investigate.
You may not be surprised to learn that women are six times more likely to die of strangulation than men. Though I wouldn’t call myself a hero, I’m sure we all recently read about my own discovery of a woman’s body, post strangulation, buried in the Florence Keller campground. This is all to say that strangulation, while perhaps the most obvious route to study male suffocation, is not the most practical.
Instead, I investigated cyanide poisoning. Cyanide is a strong field ligand. When given the choice, your own blood will abandon oxygen in favor of carrying cyanide, and in this way, we can test lung capacity. Cyanide is lethal at a concentration of 300 milligrams per cubic meter, and in these conditions, death occurs in approximately 10 minutes.
Cyanide poisoning most commonly occurs from smoke inhalation during house fires which men are more likely to experience than women. It follows then that it is less suspect to study the suffocation deaths of men involved in house fires than strangulation.
Of course, in order to compare men to rats effectively, we have to create a view over the edge of the bucket so to speak, for men experiencing cyanide poison. In this case, the view is provided by carbon monoxide.
Carbon monoxide, too, is a strong ligand—stronger even than cyanide, so your blood can be convinced to abandon cyanide for carbon monoxide—effectively saving a man from cyanide poisoning. Unfortunately, carbon monoxide poisoning is deadlier than cyanide and more painful. It is said to kill a man in around two minutes.
A man, when given the choice, will choose to inhale carbon monoxide when dying of cyanide poisoning after only one minute of suffering. This shortens his life expectancy from 10 to 3 minutes. If you’re keeping up, you understand that he could have waited until minute 10 to make this choice and effectively extended his life expectancy to 12 minutes. We would all agree that the most hopeful man would choose to extend his life as much as possible in case another antidote could be provided—as a woman does by kicking out at her attacker while her esophagus is crushed. One might believe, then, that the choice to inhale carbon monoxide so early is made out of arrogance, or hubris, rather than hope.
There are many shortcomings and gaps of knowledge in this study —for example the almond-scented millipedes, found in abundance at the Florence Keller campground, are strangely drawn to male corpses full of carbon monoxide. This footnote illuminates an entirely separate, and yet connected, path of research regarding the relationship between men, bugs, and arrogance—though I have been unable to officially study this as of yet, as the bodies of men I’ve studied have strangely, and officially, disappeared. I also want to acknowledge that my real passion is about the relationship between women and hope, but I understand that no funds are ever to be allocated by this board towards these ends and have received all of your written correspondence relaying as much. I’d like to close by saying that I would be happy to conduct further research and provide more conclusive findings on the approved topics, but I would require additional and continued financial assistance as well as some immediate volunteers from the board. I have provided a possible volunteer list in the addendum for those board members with whom I’d most like to work.
- Grant-funded Missing Men - May 22, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
