It's strange, but this video evoked the memory of a field-trip I took when I was a little boy. To alleviate the tedium of spending day after day sitting in a classroom, the school sent us all to one of those parks dedicated to recreating American colonial life. There were booths where blacksmiths worked at forges and displays of musketeers firing their primitive weapons. But what stood out to me was the recreation of a period-appropriate pharmacy. It was stocked with the sort of snake-oil panaceas peddled by the chemists and frauds of the era; I suppose the only distinction between the doctors and the charlatans was the extent to which the latter realized their medicines were useless. No cocaine or heroin available to be purchased, sadly enough. I suppose dedication to historical accuracy has its limits.
At any rate, one of the panaceas for sale was a simple box of spicy cinnamon candies advertised as an elixir. They were packaged in a flimsy box noting that the dead were cold, so the logical way to stave off the chill of the grave was heat. If you never get cold you'll never grow old. Silly, of course, but I have no doubt cheats and fakes sold a fair number of such prophylaxes against mortality back in the day. Human beings are notorious for confusing cause and effect, for mistaking superficial similarities for something more significant, especially when crisis blurs the distinction between the two.
We now acknowledge that Death makes a man cold, not that some platonic form of the Cold renders a man lifeless. We're better now, right? More rational, more sane? Well, to a point. In moments of crisis and during periods of desperation, we're more than willing to succumb to our old confusions and all of the superstitions that spring from them. The unlovable man pines for some innocuous explanation as to why he's unloved because if the fundamental problem is simple there's the tiniest chance the solution is attainable.
"Women don't want me because I have negative thoughts. Replace those with positive ones and my ailment will be remedied! Smiling will heal my deformed features just so long as I learn how to do so pleasantly and confidently enough."
Death is just as inevitable for a man as loveless life is for the repulsive monster. A steady diet of empty platitudes will lead the latter no closer to sexual affection than handfuls of cinnamon candies will bring the former to immortality.
No man wants to die and no abomination wants to die untouched and unloved even though the respective fates of each are inevitable. And so the eternal peddler, the immortal predator, will exist as long as his victims do, filling his belly by exploiting the starvation of both.