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Found a teeny gecko in the house last night – would have caught it and thrown it out but it’s really fast and very small, about the length of my thumb, tail and all. Disappeared under a door and behind some furniture before I could trap it.
I’m glad I didn’t. During my entire time in Southeast Asia (SEA) we constantly had geckos around. Geckos like living where people are because we build them houses and whatnot that are full of bugs and are much easier to survive in than out in the jungle or Texas or whatever.
The SEA version hung on the walls and ceilings of our hootches and rooms and no one bothered them because they ate every bug they found, a good thing in a part of the world where your average bug was about the size of a VW, and also because the geckos were a bit like little pit bulls who had no sense of humor about being picked up and WOULD bite and hang on. They could be pretty aggressive if you grabbed one.
They were also very fast, about three or four times larger than my new office gecko and mostly mottled green. They made a two-toned mating call that sounded very much like “Fuck You!”, the result being that they were known amongst the troops as “Fuck You Lizards”1.
Normally quiet hunters, sometimes they’d yell at each other all night trying to score. The troops used to say that it was the only thing in Southeast Asia that would tell us the truth, since when the damned things would get on a roll, it sometimes sounded like the entire place was yelling “Fuck You!”
The office Gecko2, on the other hand, says nothing so far as I can tell and is very pale, a light tan and, I suspect, very young.
But, if he’s lucky and stays out of the weather (no trick in my office, even counting the tornadoes we had roaming around today) and stuffs himself as full as he likes with whatever else is living in the corners and closets, maybe he’ll appear again another day.
I have a fond hope that someday he’ll appear, full grown, on the wall behind my monitor, eyeballing me as I type in this blog.
When I notice him, he’ll stare at me for a moment.
“Fuck You!” he’ll say.
And I’ll smile, and respond, “Just so,” and fire back a shot of Irish in his honor. After a bit, he’ll get on with bug-munching up on the window screen and I’ll get on with this, both of us content in our place in the world.
That’s so weird ~ just this afternoon I was taking a package over to the next building to drop off and I saw a teensy gecko on the walkway. It looked like a tiny beige alligator! I watched it for a minute. Then I came home and read this!
ReplyDeleteSynchronicity...
DeleteI'm in Spain at the moment and noticing loads of little lizards scooting around the cobblestones - in Australia we call them skinks. A relative, maybe. Fuck you - that's funny. You know, every time I visit your site I get tons of warnings along the lines of 'do you really want to do this?' and 'sensitive content ahead!' You're quite the fortress. Deliberate?
ReplyDeleteI was away from the blog for a short bit and just saw this -- and as with Paula (above) oddly enough I just wrote another little thinger about lizards. Specifically, "skinks". Synchronicity, yet again...
DeleteThey're all in the same family, I think but skinks are more long-bodied and short-legged.
And, yeah, I'm a security/encryption/privacy/all-that-jazz freak, but I suspect what you're hitting is the Blogger "Adult Content" warning that I decided to use. Most of my stuff is pretty inoffensive (hahahaha, I crack me up) but I didn't want to get wrapped around some mommy-group or "I'm Offended At Everything" twat who's bored decide to bitch at Blogger should their kid or some otherwise delicate little flower waddle into one of my more -- esoteric(?) -- moments.