Blog Archive | Quotes Frantic | C'est What? | The Sodchucker Climbing | Hong Kong | Sydney | Canada Animations | Videos | Photoshops    Subscribe to Mitch's Website RSS

[ Back to archive ]

Open Mouth Breather - An individual that breathes through their mouth when not exerted. The individual appears to be, and usually is, perpetually confused, not very bright, an idiot.

Ugh, there's nothing worse. Close your mouth! But really, there is worse. And that’s:

Loud Breathers.

People whose respiratory system alone creates tons of noise. Typically these are also Mouth Breathers, although it seems that Loud Breathers are usually older, whereas mostly Mouth Breathers are young. Where do all the old Mouth Breathers go? Perhaps they die early. Perhaps the simple fact that so much of their minimal brain power is allocated to the basic act of in- and ex-haling is a death sentence. How can a young Mouth Breather be expected to cope in a world of moving cars, escalators, and kitchen knives, when they are perpetually focused on the challenge of recruiting oxygen?

But some must live on! And as their bodies grow hairy, fat, saggy and slow, so does their respiratory system slowly squeeze shut. Then, a concert of ailing organs and decrepit epidermis, like the string and wind sections of an orchestra of age combined into one unholy band, rings out.

God forbid you're forced to work, or live, or hang out, or ride next to on the bus, or diagnose one. But imagine being one! Of course, that is the ultimate social paradox, the Mitch Paradox. One cannot imaging being all those things we despise, because were we those people thus afflicted, we would lack the capacity to acknowledge our failings!

Of course, that's not always true! The Mitch Paradox, like most so-called paradoxes, isn't a true paradox. It is of course possible to be the thing you despise, even despite your knowledge of it. For example, I can hear myself breathing right now. Sometimes, lying in bed, I hear a subtle "click" in my throat, as I inhale and exhale. Click. Click. Click. It's like the faintest snore, the most subtle evidence of an aryepiglottic fold losing it's tenure on youth.

And then there is, as Lianne so eloquently put it, the Nose Whistle. To quote: "how can they not know???"

But I don't need to go on, you get the point. Or do you?

The point is don't make noise when you breathe! Sadly, this is simply a circular re-statement of the Mitch Paradox: if you were lucid enough to be able and willing to take my advice to heart, you wouldn't, in the first place, make noise while you breathed.

So next time you're somewhere and someone is breathing so loudly, so horribly, that their neighbours can actually hear it, don't think to yourself "If that were me, I would never breathe that loudly..." because that's a paradox, instead think to yourself, "how did that person live as long as he did!?" and offer them help to cross the street.

They might not thank you, or even notice you there, guiding them along, but it's not their fault. They're preoccupied.