NOTICE-THIS IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK (the ones in your cabeza) BLOG.
Famous quotes:
Cleopatra, to no one in particular, after the suicide of Marc Anthony - "Keep your hands off my asp."
The bust is of Cleopatra, at the Altes Museum Berlin (Berliner Museumsinsel).
Quite a hot dish, eh?
Oh yeah and while I'm thinking about it, and I can't think of any other way to work it in...and it has not a nada to do with this post...how about a hand for our new friend, meandonnajean.
I usually don't post stories of a personal nature, except a mention now and again of my wife, daughters, brother, mother-in-law, cousins, aunts, uncles, people I owe money to, old college chums, old high school chums (and they ARE old...at least they look it to me...as opposed to moi), neighbors, ex-employers, people whom I adore, people whom I abhor (adore...abhor...they rhyme, hot damn), et al. But I NEVER, EVER, post stories about former relationships (except for that one post about that BITCH who done me wrong, grievously...and mischievously...f***ing, ho, b***h, c**t, emasculating, SL*T!...that one). Never. That's a low road to bottomless perdition.
Today, I am going to make an exception. I am making an exception because this is not really about the relationship, or our dynamite sex life, or what great melons she had...nothing like that. This is about...snakes. STOP right there. I am speaking to the gutter-minded couple of people who visit here far too often. Just stop. Not that kind of snake.
Toward the end of this relationship I was living 150 miles from the city in which she lived. So, I would go over on the weekends to her place, and drive back Sunday nights for my job on Monday. Sometimes, she would come over to my place for the weekend, to give me relief from all that driving every weekend.
A bit about this lady. She loved antiques, art, dogs and...birds. In fact she had a dog, antiques, art...and birds. The birds were little, beautiful finches. She had a variety of finches...about a dozen in all. She housed them in a bamboo cage, which was about three feet tall. She was very protective of those damned birds...don't get me wrong, they were beautiful...just a lot of them. She was protective and worried so much about them, that on the weekends she drove over to my place, she would put them, in the cage of course, and the dog, in her car and bring them with her. How romantic you say? Indeedy.
I lived on the edge of town and my lot bordered on a large wooded area. Mind you, this was in Florida...a Temperate Zone state, home to a large amount of animals, birds and...other creatures. Anyway, on the rear of my place, there was a small stoop, I suppose they're called, which was enclosed. A utility room of sorts.
For some reason, which I don't recall, on this particular weekend, she put the bird cage...with the birds in it...out there in that room.
I was pretty tired, having had a busy week at work. I layed down and took a nap, leaving her to cook some fine dinner (she was a great New Orleans type cook, oh yeah---in fact, everything I know about cooking, I learned from her).
About an hour and heavy into REM later, I was abruptly awakened by a screeching scream, reverberating throughout the house..."MY BIRDIES, MY BIRDIES...OH MY GOD, MY BIRDIES". I jumped up, not really picking up on the birdie part, half asleep, thinking a mass chain-saw murdering manic had broken into the house (we had a lot of those out there in west Florida...chainsaw massacres, that is...and birdies for that matter). I grabbed the baseball bat I keep next to the bed, not knowing exactly what I was going to do with a baseball bat against a Stihl Chainsaw, but fuckit plucket, go for it. Outside the bedroom running around, screaming, flailing her arms, with a wild look in her eyes, was my New Orleans cooking lady friend yelling, "MY BIRDIES, MY POOR BIRDIES...HELP ME...HELP ME!" No mass murderer, however.
I ran through the kitchen, smelling some great gumbo, or some such as I passed through...wanting to stop and eat, but...headed to the back stoop and the birdies. I opened the door, and the sight that greeted me was one of horror and repulsion. I forgot to add, my lady friend was still screaming hysterically...mostly directly into my ear.
In the bamboo cage was one birdie, screeching in unison with my lady friend, flying and banging it's body from one side to the other in a desperate attempt to get out (not knowing where the door was, I'm guessing). Trying to get out because at the bottom of the cage, in it's evilness, was a Red Corn Snake...also trying to get out of the cage. The snake, unlike the birdie, did not have a chance in hell of getting out. The reason? Because it had eaten all of the other birdies, and now was too fat in the middle to get back through the bamboo bars. Such is life. Sometimes we stretch too far, and we, well...get stuck. And snakes, being the dumb fuckers that they are, don't know this. They just want to eat.
The snake was doing some major hissing, the bird was doing some major banging, and my lady friend was doing some major ear drum deafening screaming. I was secretly laughing...not because the birds had been eaten...no, because it felt like a Monty Python routine, or on the serious side a Feline movie. Feathers were flying everywhere.
I yelled, "open the back door", to my friend, not the bird or the snake. I grabbed a pair of channel lock pliers I had on a tool rack, because the damned baseball bat was of no fucking use...except maybe to beat the shit out of my friend to shut her up, but prison does not appeal to me. I then opened the door of the cage, and with the piers grabbed the snake, and threw it out the back door, before it could wrap it's sliminess around my arm. Last I saw of it, it was waddling for the woods out back.
My friend eventually got over the incident and got more birds. But she never brought them back over to my place. Guess she figured the apartment of hers was a more snake un-friendly place than my back stoop. If my memory serves me well, the damned dog slept through the whole incident. I don't think a pig would have done that. No sir, a pig is a loyal and brave companion, ready to lay down it's life for it's mistress or master, if need be. A pig would have let me sleep, gone out there, opened that cage BEFORE the situation got out of hand, and beat the living shit out of that snake. Too bad they taste so good, pigs I mean.
