¡Très bien!: II: Update

¡Très bien!

"I must have ended up on the wrong planet.

Everything here is so strange." ~ Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Norwegian poet

……………………………………………

Without squeamish impress, a sense of malakos invades

Savoy’s aire, as shell-less trailers transverse tooled blades

Crossed logs, walks, outdoor tablets, pavement to grass,

Oddly, then, to plate and fine pate, washed in wine glass.

Photo by Kathryn Olmstead:  A slug slips into a pool of beer in Kathryn Olmstead’s garden.

Tiny bravery now o’er heated tins of imported lagers

Certainly not for sunning or mirroring night beggars

Dignified inclinations surge tastefully in the gardens

Brews of precious delighting preferred in toasty tins.

! Très bien! Sinfully plied as ‘slug’ yet ! Ah, escargot! 
Through long dynastic battles, steeped in slime, so slow 
Tasty gastropods creep in sleep, en marche along the stones 
Tiny silent marauders of the bottom of the damp dark zones.

~July 27, 2011

On the Nature of Offense

I never began to like any of the characters; they really didn't live at all. So I discarded the play at once. The characters were so purely cardboard. I was intentionally—for the only time, I think—trying to make a point, an explicit point, that these were nasty people and I disapproved of them. And therefore they didn't begin to live. Whereas in other plays of mine every single character, even a bastard like Goldberg in The Birthday Party, I care for." ~interview with Harold Pinter

"Many people are offended by slugs and snails….”  So it is quizzical that I am not.

In My Garden

    I love the snails and slugs of my garden.  They just keep going like that battery bunny.  I find them quite fascinating actually.  Even hysterical.  I can enter a trance instantaneously watching them inch along and suddenly I am startled to find them going over the edge into the street.  A momentary twinge inside urges me to run and grab each one and posit them safely across the road but I never do.

    These creatures of the night emerge en masse--- walking among them akin to the delicate balancing and maneuvering through a minefield.  They pop out of crevices of the wall and the walk.  As a single character it would be insane for me to plop a name on one. On second thought, Slimy Slug does come to mind. 

Slugs have piqued my interest since I discovered a picture of a slug headed for a plate of Budweiser.  The little guy braved not only a hot sun, risking instant death by dessication, but, like a cat on a hot tin roof, the undulating force transversed the hot aluminum plate’s metal surfaced edge.  He met his reward: a cool one.  Gotta hand it to him!  Nothing would keep him from his beer on a hot, sunny afternoon---not even the fear of a sizzled death!

    Earwigs and bees love beer, too, rising in my estimation of their character.  It’s the beer rage of these tiny creatures that places me under their spell.  As a former science teacher I was forced to get the bottom of this phenomenon, and soon recognized the denuding nature of the scientific bent for ‘just the facts, ma’am.’  All was not lost though.  Good thing, too, for I was beginning to endure waves of remorse for my scientific past and what horrors I may have inflicted on unsuspecting teens’ capacity for the creative bent.  Great mysteries still remain.

  “ According to a team of University of California, Berkeley researchers, it is not exactly the beer that attracts insects, but rather the carbon dioxide in the beer. Flies and other insects, the Berkeley scientists have discovered, have special taste receptors that are sensitive to carbon dioxide -- the stuff that puts the fizz in beer.

It's one or perhaps the only taste receptor discovered in addition to the five that we humans and other mammals have. We have receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savory. “(1)

They like their fizz too!

   The poor guys certainly get a bad rap.  “Cecil Adams, a newspaper columnist, stated in his column, "slugs are a leading cause of death in Seattle, owing to the effect that so many people are grossed out of existence" (2).”  Of course, they can’t directly cause death.

    The young Shep’s article, “The Slimy, yet Special Slug,” further relieved any past indiscretions I feared of ‘bombing creativity in the bud.” He reminds me, “Slugs are members of the kingdom Animalia, thus they are eukaryotic, multi-cellar, and heterotrophic.”  This highly amuses me since so am I.  Like me these gastropods are minus an outer shell.  Shep states that “the slug's body is a very interesting system that allows the organism to thrive in its environment…The slug is an excellent example of an organism that has been able to successfully adapt for survival…Slugs have an important place in the ecosystem of the world. Most slugs are herbivores, eating fungi, lichens, green plants, shoots, roots, leaves, fruits, vegetables, and flowers. “  It is noteworthy again that so do I.

“Slugs are also known for being scavengers; eating decaying vegetation, animal feces, and carrion. ( Here I draw the line in the sand refusing to establish a culinary similarity.)

“Slugs are not as much in danger of being prey as other organisms are. Many potential predators of the slug do not eat it … predators do, however, exist. They include the hedgehog, badger, shrew, mole, mouse, frog, toad, snake, carnivorous beetle, some birds, and some other mammals.”

“Ecologist Tina Teearu states, "Each and every being on earth has its place (a 'niche') in the ecosystem and together it works". If the slug was to suddenly disappear, the ecosystems and food webs that contained the slug would be drastically affected…"nutrients would be locked up in dead organisms longer and unavailable to living organisms [without the slug's presence]." This "locking up of nutrients" would effect the fertileness of soil. Fertile soil is very important to human existence, as Tina Teearu states, "at the end of the end, absolutely everything we humans eat can be tracked back to soil." While gardeners and farmers may think that the disappearance of slugs would improve their gardens and crops from being destroyed by the pesky slug, they are wrong. If slugs were to become extinct, soils would be less fertile.. Currently the slug is being studied at the University of Washington.” (3)

 1.  http://greenanswers.com/q/35659/animals-wildlife/behavior/what-creatures-other-slugs-and-snails-are-

2. Chicago Reader "Dear Cecil," activated through America Online's "Straight Dope," 1988-1997.

3.  Shep, “The Slimy, yet Special Slug,”  

           http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/1998/special.html

 Photo: " Garden slugs prefer Budweiser over imported brand", Kathryn Olmstead 

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