Yarnageddon’s love story about insects and moth tattoos made me smile. Bugs, lizards, snakes, maggots, ticks and spidery critters show up in my doodling all the time, probably because they’re everywhere in the american south. Once May hits, you can’t move an inch without getting bitten by a mosquito or running into a stream of ants. That’s the thing most southerners love about this climate. There is life bursting through the walls, and you can smell its thickness in the air (i’ve sputtered on about this before).
Alabama taught me two important biology lessons I’ve carried with me ever since. These things had a huge impact on how I dealt with the god questions (what the fuck are we doing here, is this a lab experiment, does our planetary isolation induce psychosis, why do we need religious fairy tales), and still inform decisions I make today. The first lesson was the lizard, and the second was the strawberry.
I was smoking a lot of pot back then. I’ve never been a very sober person. Regular sobriety gives me a headache, probably because I’ve never been regularly sober. Unless a substance causes a lot of trouble, like what happens to my judgement capacities when I’ve had too much wine, I see no reason to avoid it entirely. Moderation blah blah blah, yea yea yea - everyone’s different, and one person’s pot is another’s bad acid trip. You find something that improves, enhances or alters your brain waves, and hopefully you don’t fuck up too bad.
So the anole lizards happened because of a cat named Curie. She used to live with me at Ford Court, where anoles congregated in large communities. Curie would catch one or two of them a week, bring them inside and play with them until she killed them. There was one anole who escaped over and over again. I’m inclined to think it was a male.
After his third or fourth capture, he decided to live in the bathroom. I’d talk to him and after a while, he became pretty tame. He’d crawl up my arms and hang out on my shoulder, looking at things from a new elevation as I walked around, smoked cigarettes or scribbled down bad poetry. I spent a lot of time looking at him eye to eye, and realized we were on the same level. Then, one sad afternoon, he got his guts ripped out after another bout with Curie.
He was still alive when I got home, and he died in my hand. An overwhelming wave of grief knocked me down, and I was scream-sobbing when my old boyfriend came over. He thought a family member had been killed, the way I was going on. It must’ve been a little ridiculous; what did I expect? But the eye to eye thing had a huge impact on how I interacted with life forces other than my own, and to be given that lesson - that any berry on any bush is just as valuable as you are - is a gift I still deeply cherish, and maybe sometimes take too seriously. Unless you fuck with my home or my loved ones, I won’t kill you. I’ll do my best to get you off my property or out of harm’s way, but I won’t kill you. This applies to humans as well (with the exception of traffic, where we’re all out for blood).
The strawberry thing only reinforced this conviction, and it was too small and quick an instance to sound interesting in words. I was really high, and there were strawberries in the kitchen (I think I had a vegan roommate at the time, and vegans and vegetarians are like democrats and republicans when it comes to how easily they can annoy me). I put a strawberry in my mouth, and it felt like a cold piece of beef.
As neurons connected in my brain, the moment registered: This thing used to be alive, and now it’s dead. Anyone who thinks cutting the throat of a cow is any less a killing act than yanking a tomato plant up by the roots is an idiot. Mammals are messier and fattier to kill for our food. I think it’s just as fucked up to see warehouses jammed with stacks of clinically wrapped slabs of meat as it is to have strawberries available for purchase when there’s snow on the ground.
That’s why vegetarians and vegans make me laugh sometimes. Not the food - the food is typically very tasty, because veggie chefs are creative with spices and sauces and cool combinations - but the moral side. And the side that suffers from protein deficiency. There I am, watching the yoga-tuned white people order their vegan cupcakes and lemon edamame, giggling to myself with globs of pork and barbecue smeared on my lips, and then I remember the lizards and the strawberries, and I pick up the pipe.