*Otherwise known as “She’s That One, That One over There!”
ONCE OR TWICE or so in my life, as I spend a lot of time to myself, I have experienced a rather pretentious daydream. Sometimes I dreamed it while on a short stroll out of doors. It's sort of goes like this: I wonder if humanity was meant to evolve any further. If there could be any more developments along the same, oh quite a different, line.
Actually, being Latino, Hispanic or “el muy Chicano” – and being an “Indian” – has been around for quite a while, comparatively speaking. This is what I'm wondering: what if we, or some other creature (here in this daydream I have oft looked about at the scenery I was passing and as I walked) will ever evolve into something much further deranged and even weirder than being human. And then at times I would, if near a park or a green patch, stray off the sidewalk. Especially if no one else was close. And I’d begin to look more closely at the plant life.
Chamomile was always easy to spot, growing low to the ground, inhabiting many sidewalk cracks. "I'd walk a mile for chamomile! " Sometimes I’d collect it; this yellow herb is mildly sedative, and much warmer than beer for an at-night aperitif. Teeny tiny little golden flowers that smell nice. If people were nowhere nearby I'd poke around in the shrubbery. And I squatted down to search through it, even getting down on my hands and knees. One time I shot to my feet, screaming, hurriedly brushing off two dozen army ants.
Almost every time I’d spot some new entity, a plant I've never encountered anywhere else, an insect having no pictorial representative I'd ever seen before. Once I thought I saw a severed human foot in deep bushes, but it turned out to be an old shoe with a filthy, sandy sock stuffed into it. I couldn't find the other shoe. They were three sizes too big. Gave ‘em to Artie.
In my rooms I kept several botanical encyclopedias and insect collection kits left over from my boyhood, and occasionally I would carefully garner a specimen, hustle it jealously home, and waste time comparing it to hazy, freakish, colorful pictures. I needed new eyeglasses, and promised myself I’d buy some.
On those happy occasions when I had Saragina over for afternoon British “high tea,” your interloping is most welcome, about thrice monthly, I’d haul out the latest formerly irate centipede and proudly display the prize catch, often to minor protestations from my affectatedly cynical lady love.
She seldom deigned to go out collecting with me. I couldn’t fool her! “We can’t coerce you into silly pasttimes, you a-dult, you, and none of us can talk Artie out of ‘em,” I pettishly bemused aloud. She agreed, demure and piquant, coquettishly, to the occasion.
Or is it, crumpettishly? Crumble always go the crumbs. Almost always. I spilled my tea. Another day. Another hard-on. A beautiful, rare, sunny September afternoon that drove me out of the old neighborhood and into the deeper, more hidden recesses of a small child's park north-west of "town," proper. It’d been placed aside and planted and named only recently, about seven years ago, when the freeway was being built north of that area. A major road ran alongside it, heading south/north.
I walked the five miles to the park, collection kit in hand. No one was there as I strolled into the only visible picnic site, bordered by twin your pits with charcoal grills. In between them was a house-sized wooden picnic shelter. Three or four crows were hanging around the shelter, interloping six pigeons as well, and quite the flock of chickadees, cute small brown-patterned birdies the hop and skip overmore than flying. They’re super-friendly, and don't mind hopping right up to strangers.
Some a’ the li’l peepers bounced up to say hi as a strolled past the shelter, glaring up at me beseechingly for food. I scattered about a half cup of birdseed I’d carried with me, stuffed into my right-hand jacket pocket. The birds began to eat it.
Meanwhile I continued around the shelter. Heading for a bank of trees, I intended to locate a picnic table to rest my weary bones upon. LONG walk, pheww.
And so, there I was in a small, secluded park, alone except for birds, out of town for the day, with no one to bother me, no need for human speech, and most importantly, no beer. And no…what's this?
I looked down, and below me was a wide slime trail, glistening on the grass directly underfoot, as though it had been painted in a two-foot wide path with something viscous and clear. The trail arced around to the other side of the picnic shelter, where the undergrowth had retaken much of its place. There was a steady, growing feeling of damp chill as I moved forwards to the shelter, back behind it, where the plants out what was left of the late afternoon sun.
I felt as an explorer must feel, perhaps one who had gone a bit too far. I lifted some overhanging lime-green brush, feeling it bristly and wet in my left hand, and peered in…
…there it was… a slime mold. Hidden in the depths of the cool green shade.
Oh, God, what an unbelievable monstrosity! No, it can't be that, because that does not move there, behind the shelter, keeping in the shade. It was out front…it locomoted to here, to be in the moist coolness during the heat of the day. I tried to get a good look, hesitantly pulling back, as though to avoid touching anything. It was an oozing thing, slimy, a spongy big mass of grainy, porous flabbiness, not of God's Brazen Earth…or, I sensed an eery friendliness to it. Was it trying to tell me something? I’ve always been a Scientist, wanting to study entomology in College.
Whatever it was had been moving around, rippling on its outer surface like water, or perhaps it was rustling leaves. Or cattle. I began to brush aside the low overhanging branches from an evergreen tree, on my left, when the shrill screams came. Pivoting towards it, I saw the chickadees devoured by another slime mold, one just the same as the hidden mass I’d discovered. It had stuck up on five of them, and had trapped them, amoeboid. Three obscene feet of slimy shapeless limb visible.
The little tiny birds screamed hideously. The arm was drawing them in, across the front of the shelter on the other side. I lurched out of the tangled bank and began to grab at this squacking chickadees, bravely attempting rescue, when I accidentally saw around to the front side of the picnic shelter…
Hours later, Saragina handed me a warm cup of tea. It didn't slow my shuddering; I was still chilly, very cold, inside and out. So very cold and wet and miserable. “It’s not THAT cold outside t’day.” Sara-genie soothed my furrowed brow. “QUIT all that shaking!” I turned my melancholiest eyes up at m’lady love, burying my nuzzling browner nose in the teacup. I jaggedly smiled.
“It’s colder than you think, my sweet Britannia darling.” Oh, their Kingdom for an economy car and some cigarettes, or some Mary Jane and a Bic. “I have boiled eggs in the kitchen, deviled eggs; you don’t need the Devil for those, dear!”
My Spidie Sense was tingling. What if my face was under that white man’s Peter Parker red and blue superhero mask? Would…could…should we then feel fulfilled, swinging on the right kind of rope for a change?
The Rainbow Horizon - A Tale of Goofy Chaos Page 10