Lizard Madness
Like an endless column of army ants, the lizards invade without compunction. They arrived early this summer and decided to stay. What good are they? Some fool allowed as how they eat mosquitoes. Huh! They are mosquitoes. With tails.
There are experts who have long suspected that it’s the lizards; yes, the lizards that are responsible for just about everything in this year gone so wrong. LIzards. They’re everywhere in squads far exceeding any useful numbers or historic justification. One sees them out of the corner of the eye — darting from place to place on important missions, too secret to contemplate. Lizards! Reptiles! Everywhere. And who’s to say they didn’t carry a Coronavirus to us this year? Lizards! Not to be confused with salamanders, snakes, or toads. Those are completely different animals with their own set of politics. No, I’m referring to the zillions of speedy little creatures that appeared overnight and are almost impossible to reason with. They’re fast and guileful, some might say downright cunning in their diabolical over population of our backyards, our gardens, and garages, patios, pools and playgrounds. They walk on walls, and ceilings, they laugh at gravity. They mock us. Indeed, the hateful little pip-squeaks can easily go nuclear in a backyard the size of a commemorative stamp.
An Ode to the lowly lizard,
With hardly the sense to get out of a blizzard.
Born low on the chain,
They left much in our brain,
Yet scurry about with no feathers, nor gizzards.
They travel in packs and pairs and sometimes all alone. They hunt day and night; ;they carry on very little polite conversation with most Americans, yet seem terribly proud of their goofy names like the Red-Spotted Toad, the Common Chuckwalla, Zebra-Tailed Lizard, Common Side-blotched Lizard,. The Western Skink (not to be confused with the Eastern skank — a different breed entirely), Desert Horned Lizard (we used to call them “Horny Toads” when I was a kid back in Albuquerque; almost impossible to catch but worth the effort; the scorching mesas in the summertime proved a paradise for ten-year-olds on the hunt, although our prime prey was the Blue-Tailed Lizard, blindingly quick – a wizard lizard, the bigger the better—sometimes we snagged only the tail of those desperate little criminals so anxious to outsmart us that they left us with a quivering turquoise colored ten-inch tail, still wiggling, while the smart-ass lizard got away.
Benny the Blue Tail was like that. He was our nemesis. ‘Though we hunted him for years we never caught him. To this very day he smiles in the shade beneath a giant thistle plant – a tumbleweed – where many a scratched knee or scuffed-up elbow served to enhance his legend.
It is beyond dispute that these loathsome reptiles, all of them and all of their kind, are wholly responsible for our sadness: The deleterious effects of the pandemic, the foolishness of unstylish face masks, worrisome unemployment numbers, negative interest rates, rolling blackouts, 112-degrees in the shade, social distancing, an autumn without football, the harvesting of votes and the likelihood that more bad stuff is just around the corner. After all, there is an election coming.
