Earlier today I was casually gazing out the window when I noticed a gecko, the dull grey kind, which might not even be a gecko, and it was sunning itself on a rock and then set off for the shade of something growing in what I have come to call, to me, in my head, my garden. The small circular flower bed in the front yard, designed by Laetitia, and tended by me with a mixture of enthusiasm and chaotic decision making for a year or so now.
Then an Indian mynah strutted over, nabbed the lizard, held it in it’s evil yellow beaky while deciding what to do next, and flew off. I said nothing, but I thought, “Hey, put that back! It’s mine.”
So I suppose there is a certain amount of proprietorship going on. In a sense the flowers are mine and vegetables are Laetita’s, but each belongs to both of us too, in another way; and in yet another neither belongs to us, singly or together, as we are renting. And in a way that’s like having your dreams, and indeed your life, held to ransom by a shadowy figure you’ve never met (in our case) who can alter many things and even do away with what we’ve come to regard as expectations, in a whim.
Not a pleasant point to dwell upon. Well, not for too long anyway.
I was fussing over one of the cyclamen and looking for traces of nefarious little beasties which can think of nothing so tasty as eating cyclamen leaves for lunch, and dinner, and the other stand and not-so-standard meals, and a spider web was in the way, and I took it down, leaving the spider to retreat into her lair, somewhere inside the “Tahitian bridal veil”, and it seemed, in that instant that some unknown stuff was known to me. It’s long been a late-night drunken conversational topic that, in my view, perhaps, alien space travel, should it exist, isn’t in shiny chrome vehicles we think of from the Cold War and American cartoons from the 1950s – maybe alien ships are a kind of organism, or an agglomeration of organisms. I have absolutely no foundation for making this claim, if indeed it is correct to call theorising, with scant (read no) evidence that something which might not exist could actually exist in a different form from the form most people expect it to take, if it actually does exist. We aren’t talking about a peer-reviewed paper for Nature here. But it was in this mental mood of reaching for the stars, and attempting to think up freaky shit that no-one else has quite thought up yet – and pursuing the ‘organic’ technology theme – I wondered if the building that aliens do is sometimes a bit like what spiders do … although possibly on a gigantic scale. Huge, scary, poisonous creatures, the size of a block of units, with eight legs, which can shoot web strands out of their spider web shooting cavity, and the strands are stronger than really strong steel. And they can fly across galaxies, perhaps with the help of their mates.
Maybe it’s the alien arachnoids which will kill us all … and maybe they don’t and won’t exist, so there’s nothing to worry about.
And maybe this is all a bit silly.
Laetitia woke with a migraine this morning and I did doting boyfriend things while her head threatened to explode and there was attendant unsavoury bother which it wouldn’t do to detail now. I’d like to think I’m like some sort of US Marine who’s seen some shit you wouldn’t believe, and the thousand yard stare is proof of that, but there’s no thousand yard stare. I’m just a bloke who took a day off work to make sure his partner was OK, and recently had a brief nap. But my eyes are feeling a bit itchy.
Johan Turdenmeier's Miscellany 