Snake Whacking Season Begins
Unlike the rest of the Geeks (Greeks?), I live to the south of Seattle, in Olympia, Washington, which is a lovely little slice of heaven somewhere between Tolkien's Shire and the Green Greens arena in Smash Brothers. It's basically a town interspersed by enormous sections of forested hills, running straight up against Puget Sound. I really do like it here, and not simply because I'm not forced to drive on 75 degree angle streets. Sure, there's lots of foul smelling hippies, there's only one 24 hour grocery store, and renting movies from a foreign land is impossible without the help of Netflix.
Still, there's something most foul that lurks just a few yards away from my Sensory Deprivation Chamber, and that is a garter snake hibernaculum. What's a hibernaculum, you ask? OH DEARIE ME. From Wikipedia:
"In zoology, a hibernaculum is the location chosen by an animal for hibernation. Commonly this may be a hibernating mammal or insect."
Of course, this is Wikipedia, so it's also got "In music, Hibernaculum is a single by Mike Oldfield from his The Songs of Distant Earth album, and the name of an album by the band Earth." Thankfully, Wikipedia has a policy where they try to discourage trivia sections. Hopefully that also applies to everything I'm not immediately interested in.
Garter snakes, in case you were not aware, are not hatched from eggs like other snakes. They are born live. Female garter snakes secrete a pheromone that attracts male garter snakes for miles, gathering in one little hole by the hundreds around the one female. One of these female garter snakes (and presumably her many female offspring) has chosen the vacant forest lot behind my apartment as her mating space, not to mention the hundreds of females she also has pumped out over the years. I don't know (or even care) how long garter snakes live. I don't want to.
I need to preface this by saying that I actually like creepy crawly things, generally. I like rats, after a roommate bred them and I learned they were actually fairly clean and intelligent. I like spiders, especially after I allowed one that lived in my window to live and I watched it make it's lovely web every morning. I even have an emperor scorpion encased in orange lucite on my coffee table, which I consider to be one of my favorite objects.
But if there's one thing I hate, more than anything else on the planet, it's snakes.
Sweet Christ do I hate snakes. I hate everything about them, I hate everything they do, I hate their activities and, most importantly, I hate the way they writhe about. I hate their cold, unblinking eyes. I hate their glassy, alien, evil scales. I hate that they manufacture neurotoxin like it's going out of style.
I. Hate. Snakes.
I once dated a girl (zomg, I know, rite?) that was equally terrified of snakes. It was probably the only thing we had in common. She took it the next step and hated anything that reminded her of snakes, included pussycats, which admittedly have that cold predatorial streak to them, when they're not being ADORABLE. So, clearly, I'm not THAT bad. I'm not phobic of snakes, I just hate them. I feel no compunction whatsoever fulfilling the Biblical mandate to crush their heads beneath the heel of my foot. I swerve to hit one on the road.
Anyway, with spring comes snakes, by the hundred. I always jump when I see one, every single time. I think that maybe it's an ancestral Jungian imperative. Somewhere in my genetics, snakes were a serious problem. Ancient Sexcabs were flung into a daily life-or-death struggle with these demonic creatures, and I am doomed to repeat their struggle even into the modern world and the Pacific Northwest, where our snakes are actually fairly innocuous.
I not only wish that all snakes were eradicated, but that we set up some sort of Department of Herpetological Homeland Security, where all governmental bureaus have a single clearinghouse from which to attack the ever increasing snake menace. I, personally, am for the death penalty for any being caught being a snake without legal authority to do so. Of course, I might be a little old fashioned in these things, so a snake Abu Ghraib and a snake Gauntanamo is also acceptable. The snakes need to be humiliated, first. They need to be photographed in sexually humiliating poses and forced to recant their snaky ways at gunpoint. These snake prisons will have very tiny bars on the windows, so the snakes can look out and see the world that they are no longer allowed to be participants in, to remind them that their kind cannot be tolerated in this modern day and age. Imagine little orange snake prison uniforms. Little snake shivs and little snake gay rape scenes. Little snake prison law degrees and little snake dining halls and little snake murders in little snake laundry rooms. Little snake Aryan Brotherhoods.
Yes, a prison for snakes is what we need, because they've been snakes once, they will be snakes again, and they will continuing being snakes as long as they're allowed that freedom. We have the children to think about, first and foremost. He have to keep these recidivist serpents off the streets and out of the playgrounds.
