Limits

Okay, I think I may be able to manage one posting per month. This even takes into account my boycotting of Facebook as just another time-suck. I mean it!

We all have limits. Sometimes those limits are physical, as I learned a few days ago after cleaning out the garage.

I have a large pile of scrap lumber, mostly plywood, leaning up against two 6x6 beams of oak that are probably 12 feet long. Why do I have these? No idea, but why would I get rid of such massive timbers?

When I moved all the scrap plywood out of the way, I saw that the previously covered side of the oak beams was crawling with a half-dozen cave crickets. After a soothing beverage to cool my screech-torn vocal cords, I returned to the garage to find all the crickets still in situ with one. Important. Addition.

A very large wolf spider had approached them.

TEE HEE HEE! I giggled, putting my hands to my mouth and getting very wide-eyed. TEE HEE HEE!

I watched the crickets stupidly and suicidally crawl in their disgusting way closer and closer to the waiting spider. TEE HEE HEE! I may have clapped my hands.

Closer and closer ... but the spider didn't move. I sprinted into the house for a camera, and when I returned I saw that the arachnid-hellbeast standoff had continued. So, moaning, I approached, camera in hand, to get a better look.

I have seen some beauteous and wonderful sights in my short life, but nothing as delightful as this: a cricket was hanging from the spider's jaws.

TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! I gamboled and capered about, pointing and gibbering like a chimp. The spider sat there, calmly draining her prey's liquefied innards through the fang holes in its spotted carapace.

I adjusted the light and snapped a few photos. Hooray for wolf spiders! HOORAY!

What about limits? The cricket discovered the limits of sharing a stack of wood with a wolf spider. Because once in a while your neighbor gets ... hungry.

Clamps ahoy

Clamping the port lower sheer stringer -- an eighteen-foot piece of floppy fir that curves in three dimensions (and some days, four) -- requires clamps. Lots and lots of clamps:


What you see here is:

• The stringer itself, or its lower half at least, going diagonally across the shot. It fits into a notch in a frame.
• The frame itself is braced and clamped to withstand the Herculean forces applied by my muscles and the stringer as I torque it into position.
• Two pinch clamps holding cedar wedges in place. So I cut the notch too big and had to wedge it out. What?

Multiply this by a half-dozen frames or so, and it adds up to a lot of clamps.
What's neat about this stage of the build is that the shape of the boat -- a leaf, a cockle, the curve of a gull across the sky -- really starts to show itself. Squint if you can, and look past the clamps and bracing to see the edge of the boat, arcing up toward the bow.

And later, lo, the boatbuilder was tired and retired inside where the lion hath laid down with the lamb. For lo, he opened a beer and all was right with the world.

Now I have a fly swatter. Ho ho ho.

The trouble with hitting, or trying to hit, cave crickets with scraps of wood is that I get worried about banging up the boat. And if I end up damaging the boat while attempting to dissuade cave crickets from whatever it is that they do, my rage will be Biblical.

So I picked up a fly swatter. Fly swatters are kind of hard to find. Maybe the Internet has made them obsolete; for all I know there's some kind of e-swatter everybody's downloaded. But I was able to find an archaic "real" fly swatter.

I'm not sure it will be able to withstand the crispy, horned carapace of a cave cricket, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Except that, now that I've hung the fly swatter in the shop, no cave crickets have shown themselves. Which means that either I've found the right deterrent ... or they are planning something.

Meanwhile, Steve and Bruce, in Steve's boat (the same Pathfinder design I'm building), are rocketing across the Bay in Small Craft Warning conditions. Like I said to a friend once: Small Craft Warnings just mean there's finally going to be some good wind!

Corpsey the Squirrel

Hi! I'm Corpsey the Squirrel! I got run over by a car about a week ago, or maybe more. It's kinda hard to keep track of time passing when your head is half an inch thick, ha ha!

Anyway, ever since "the transition," as I call it, I've been hanging around on the side of the road, just kinda watching the world go by, you know? At first crows picked at me, and once they even flipped me over so I could see out of my other eye. Just kidding, I don't have any eyes.

Oh, Corpsey, I told myself. You may not be a "living" squirrel anymore but chin up! Oops, never mind, you don't have a chin either. Well, stay positive, Corpsey. You may be talking to yourself but something is sure to come along sooner or later.

Then one day it rained, and what did old Corpsey do? Well, I drifted over to the gutter and hung around under the leaves for a while. Then IT happened! A big friendly dog found me and we became best friends!

By "best" I mean "delicious" and by "friends" I mean "a chew toy." This was great! And boy, was this dog happy! He carried me all the way home, chewing away. It would have tickled but those things don't really bother me any more. I think he was going to take me inside the house. Maybe even wipe me on the couches and people's faces: delightful!

Then there was some sort of commotion and I was drenched with a stream of water. Some blasted human was spraying my dog-buddy with a hose! Disaster for Corpsey! The dog -- Benedict Arnold, I'm calling him -- eventually dropped me and was taken firmly inside. "Hey!" I called out, sort of. "What about Corpsey?" But they ignored me.

So now I'm stuck in the leaves, waiting for my next adventure. Where will I end up next? Maybe another dog will come along and save me!

Lice

This morning I was trying to write a scene where lice play an important role. What are lice like? I am lucky enough to have no idea. No, really, I don't!

So although I eschew e-books, I happily went online to research lice. Of which, it turns out, there are many sorts. My arm itched a little just looking at the pictures.

Lice are small. They are bugs. They are itchy, and lay eggs, and can carry diseases. But what do they FEEL like crawling up your arm? My head itched. Do they skitter like tiny ants? Do they bite with a piercing red itch, like a flea (now those I have had)? My elbow itched. Do they just wander around causing general itching, like poison ivy (ditto)? Can you eat them like monkeys do? What do they taste like? Crunchy? Salty? Squirmy or so tiny you can't even tell whether you're biting down on a louse or a poppy seed?

Pretty soon I was scratching myself all over but still no closer to understanding, truly, personally, in the flesh, what it's like to have lice. And soon I may have to face the question: how far am I willing to go in the name of verisimilitude and accurate writing?

The answer makes me itch.

Taken home

Get taken a lot. Taken when I was little away from motherlap, motherwarm, mothermilk. Taken from others, wiggling and warm and crying like me.

Taken to a new place, didn't know, didn't like it. Food but not hungry. Blanket but not tired. Scared. Dark. No others.

Taken outside sometimes. SMELLS sweet grass sour road warm squirrelpath, dog dog dog dog dog dog, marking here. Taken away from trash smell, from food smell, from motherlap smell.

Lived with others, not so cold anymore. Not so dark. Sleeping, outside and in, sometimes on the couch until the big ones made scary noises at me. Hiding, sometimes, under porch under bed under bed.

Same for long time. Everything the same, everything good, understand it all now. Walk. Outside. Smell. Mark. Eat. Sleep. Outside. Big ones scratching ears, scratching neck, rubbing head good good good.

Taken again. Big ones gone. Taken to a different place, full of others, loud and smells and scared and scared and strange others, fear and anger and hate and fear and alone alone alone.

Loud. Screaming others. Always loud, always strange. Smells different, food different, big ones different.

Not hungry. Not loud. Not eating. Everything coming at once, everything closing, everything crushing closer closer closer.

Loud and loud and loud everywhere. Not eating. Not sleeping. Not drinking. Loud screaming smells and screaming.

Taken out. Two big ones, and quiet. Waited. They came again. Taken out again, taken into car. Noise and bumping and can't stand, can't eat. Smells and strange and smells and noise noise noise.

Taken out of car. Grass strange. Sun strange. Smells strange: cat and bird and squirrelpath and dogs street leaves mouse woodsmoke creekwater lowflowers treeflowers dirt mud trash big ones.

Taken inside. Catsmell strange. Blanketsmell strange. Floorsmell strange.

Eating. Sleeping. Catbarking. Outside smelling.

Good now. Sleeping sleeping.

It Has Probably Exploded By Now

Yesterday's boatbuilding began with me discovering two mating camel crickets as I was moving plywood in search of a Torx wrench for my bike. I calmly re-swallowed my lunch, selected a long piece of scrap wood, and BANGED THE BEJABBERS out of the other side of the plywood.

A second inspection showed the in flagrante disgusting situation had ended and the crickets were nowhere in sight. Teach them to join carapaces near my boat. What I need are some raccoons, snakes, and wolf spiders to eat up the crickets.

Then I worked more on the starboard sheer stringer: a long, bendy piece of fir that -- in defiance of all laws of physics, wood properties, and sense of moral rightness -- stops being bendy as soon as I clamp it along the frames, and instantly becomes a spring loaded-piece of fragrant (it is fir, after all) death. Every time I struggle to get it into the frame notches I feel like I'm slowly cranking a crossbow into high tension.

Well, I shot a few clamps through the air and dropped a few more on my feet, but finally got everything lined up into a nice fair curve. So far the stringer has not ripped the frames out of the boat. Then, as if things weren't precarious enough already, I drilled it for 30mm x #8 countersunk bronze screws. Now my spring-loaded, just-reached-maximum-bend, did-you-know-a-crossbow-bolt-can-drop-a-velociraptor-at-forty-yards, fir stringer has been further weakened by half a dozen holes.

Despite the mortal terror of the stringer and the crickets, I managed to keep all the clamps in place and scuttle inside. I was afraid to check it this morning before work.

And I never found the Torx wrench.

Notice How I Didn't Soil Myself

Sometimes an event will take place that is so earth-shattering, it knocks aside my typical writing and boatbuilding self-indulgences. This happened last night, and it involve a four-foot dowel and a shot of single malt!

Everybody knows the spider armies have been massing in my lawn, preparing a nightmarish assault on the world of giant bipeds (us). For a few nights now I've been shiveringly shining my not-nearly-bright enough flashlight on the driveway next to the garage, where a palm-sized, starfish-lookin', kitten-eating wolf spider flexes its arachnid biceps and makes faces back at me.

Ha ha, I tell it nervously, hopping sideways to avoid turning my back on it, ha ha, there's a good spider, you just staaaay there.

So when I came home after work yesterday to find a spider curled inside the top corner of our entryway like a brown fist, I calmly changed into biking clothes and rode as fast as I could for an hour and a half.

Later in the evening I (my wife) decided the spider had to go. While it was great that our house was instantly cleared of bugs, one of our cats was unaccounted for and that wouldn't do.

At this point I discovered I have a mild phobia of spiders, and that things I thought I was afraid of (heights, biting deer, grinning old men in the dark) were in fact not phobias whatsoever. I found a four-foot dowel and a large glass bowl, and, sweating, tried to knock the spider off the ceiling into the bowl.

Was the bowl in my hand? No it most certainly was not. It was on the floor, where the non-web-spinning spider would fall into it.

When the dowel approached the hell-spider, it curled up, then reared back and attacked the dowel. The thing was fighting the dowel. This would be akin to me, upon encountering, say, the Eiffel Tower poking at me, assuming a kung-fu pose and beckoning fifty stories of steel to come dance, mofo.

The spider fought; I clenched and sweated, and eventually knocked it down the wall. At which point the non-web-spinning spider lowered itself on a strand of silk and dangled there. So much for bug identification. We looped the strand, dropped it into the bowl, and I took it far, far away outside to release into the darkness.

I dried my palms and decided the salty brown fire of Talisker would be the best thing for the shaking. And it was.

This Coffee Tastes Catty

From yesterday's New York Times: the revelatory discovery that not only can you make coffee from cat-excreted coffee beans, it's actually a sought-after delicacy.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

It's not just any cat, but the Indonesian quasi-cat called the civet. The civets eat the coffee beans (?), deposit them (??), they are collected with sighs of delights (???) and then ground into delicious coffee (!??!??).

Now. I love my coffee. After a vigorous campaign of sighing and feeling sorry for myself, our local grocery store finally caved and now carries Peet's Coffee again, so once more I have the strength to face the day.

But civet-crapped coffee!? I'm sorry, that's just ... I mean, can you even imagine ... Okay, who am I kidding, I would try it. There, I said it!

After all, when you're, say, wandering the jungles of Java, and you find some droppings that look curiously like coffee beans -- and you have a roaster, grinder, press, fire, and water -- why not just go for it?

In this vein I'd like to suggest some other untraditional uses for animals:

-- temporary tattoos made from butterflies that cling to you (the ink sinks in and they fly off, colorless)
-- clothes made from worm excreta (never mind, somebody's already thought of that.)
-- trained snakes to hunt rabbits (they're just the right shape for snaking down rabbit holes; also for finding lost socks behind the dryer)
-- horse trumpets (don't ask)
-- flying piranhas

Okay, Nature, get to work!

Crickets Beware

I have recently come to realize that if I want to build a boat that looks more like a boat than the closing half of a parenthesis, I'm going to need to be able to get to the port side.

Two years of boatbuilding and garage-storage has littered the wall of the garage with scrap wood, boat frames from an abandoned project, great loops of rope, a few cardboard boxes filled with smaller cardboard boxes of screws, firewood, a rake, two shovels, 200' of 14-gauge extension cord, and so on.

For the most part I've been able to teeter on a stack of 2x4s (as perilous as it sounds) or reach across from the starboard side, or wiggle in under the building jig (crickets, spiders, and nightmares galore).

But as I now need to dry-fit and install the port chine, well: time to clean!

Last night I opened the garage door, donned what I hoped would be cricket-proof gloves, and pulled out as much detritus as I could. Most of this was scrap wood: little knobs of locust, or strip cutoffs, or things accidentally epoxied to each other. Some of it might have been good firewood, but I gotta boat to build, there's no time for discernment! Into the big plastic trash can it all went, to be sorted through later.

Now that side of the boat is not only accessible, but swept clean of dust and the bones of spider victims. In all of this, I saw not a single cricket.

Which means they have massed themselves somewhere. Probably inside my pillowcase or under my toast or somewhere equally ghastly.

Night Of The Crickets

After my slick chine-lengthening move (see previous post) I returned to the boat project with vigor and optimism! Immediately I set to work test-fitting and then bending the second (middle) of three chine pieces.

As I was working up near the bow, I realized that I hadn't seen any spiders in a while.

Don't get me wrong, the normal cobweb spiders spin their hairy webs over everything. I have decided their fangs are too small to puncture my skin, so I don't worry about them apart from flailing like an electrocuted Wookiee when I wander through their webs.

No, what was missing -- speaking of Wookiees -- were the wolf spiders. I've written about these before. Suffice it to say that the method of finding these leviathans is to go into your yard at night with a flashlight. And look for the glowing eyes in the grass. I am not kidding.

Wolf spiders eat, among other things (dolphins, gazelles, lambs), crickets. Not just any crickets, but the hunch-backed, striped, spidery horrors called camel crickets.

These are so ghastly, so viscerally awful that I cannot even post an image. Prop yourself in front of a bucket and Google them if you must.

So wolf spiders eat camel crickets. No wolf spiders in the shop equals ...

I reached under the boat to tighten a screw and nearly put my hand on a cricket the size of my thumb tip.

When I returned to the ground -- seriously, one moment I was kneeling under the boat and then next I was five feet away after some sort of fugue state -- the cricket was gone.

Ha, I said (after saying other things), and reached for a killing stick.

Since it's a wooden boat I'm building, there are scraps of wood everywhere. No shortage of long clubs with with to dispatch a cricket. I found a piece of wood. Found the cricket. Made the cricket not be a cricket anymore.

Look, I'm sorry but there are certain things I will not tolerate, and camel crickets infesting my boat is one of them.

A few minutes later I nearly stepped on another one. Different cricket, different wood scrap. Same result.

Now I find myself in need of a hungry wolf spider that will eat crickets but not me. Looks like it's time to go spider-spottin' with my headlamp and leather gloves.

In Which I Avoid The Bear

"Bear Update," was the title of an e-mail recently sent to everyone in our neighborhood. "A bear and her cub have been spotted roaming the streets and woods."

Now, I do not live on the Aleutian Islands, or Alaska, or the zoo. I have seen bears a few times WAAYYYY up in the Virginia mountains, but having them loitering by my mailbox is a bit much. Especially considering the stomach-churning fear everyone experiences when they think about things "a bit too much" while running in the foggy dark before sunrise.

The deer are bad enough, huddling behind bushes and mailboxes, waiting for me to approach -- rubbing their hooves together, I imagine -- and then exploding across the road in a rain of demon-hooves and swaying tree branches. Ha ha! Hilarious, deer! Perhaps you'd like to try my venison-flavored deer treats!

This morning I was trotting along in the milky ghost light of a rainy night and thin moon, when I saw outlined against the dim road a squat thing moving in the leaves. I veered right; it followed. I swerved left, it followed.

Easy, easy, I whispered. This is reality. Reality! Come on, reality! When I saw it waving long arms and legs I felt the long cold shiver down my scalp and neck.

It was my shadow.

In my defense, it was a solid-looking shadow because the air was so humid and it caught on ... uh, water droplets ... three-dimensional....

The worst part is that it startled me twice. On the same run. As in, "I know the last thing was just my shadow but this new hell-denizen is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT."

Somehow I made it home without crashing into deer, bear, or anything worse. If I could just convince myself that the "bear" was just someone rehearsing a Halloween costume, then all I need is candy.

If I see the bear I will pelt it with Smarties and lock the door.

Animals Gone Wild

Another one from the NY Times, fast becoming the premier weird-animal-fact-discoverer. Evidently, fanged, bird-eating frogs have been discovered in Southeast Asia. ***SPOILER ALERT*** It's actually Dracula.

Frogs that eat birds? No, thanks. That's almost as bad as spiders that eat birds, wasps that paralyze and lay their eggs inside live tarantulas, and eagles that eat monkeys. I guess you could have a gruesome circle of life: Frog and spider team up to catch bird; bird escapes and goes off to eat monkey; spider is attacked by wasp and becomes horrible paralyzed living nursery for wasp larva, which consume it as they grow and eventually eat their way out.

"Circle of life" may be an optimistic term, now that I think about it. Circle of Painful Death And Sometimes Crippling Fights For Survival doesn't have the same ring to it, though.

Seriously, once you start thinking of humans as prey, poor wee naked monkeys with neither claws nor fangs nor defensive stings (most of us, anyhow) things move into the crueler perspective already shared by the rest of the natural world.

Would my two housecats stalk, kill, and eat me if I was smaller? No doubt. After which they would probably have a hurking fit and barf me onto a section of rug (never linoleum, oh no, they aim for carpet).

Yesterday I encountered further signs that animals have Had It Up To Here. First, as I was recounting my tale of near-gut-exploding terror at work, one guy noted that he had actually run into a deer while jogging.

Was the deer stupid? Nearly blind in the darkness? Or simply ... waiting?

RUNNER: Is that ... a tree branch? A shadow? What the...?
DEER: Oh, step on, mofo. Let's dance.

Then, after work, I was biking up a cruelly steep gravel road when I rounded a bend and saw a fat copperhead snake S-coiled in the road. I noted the location (left turn, powerlines, steep camber) so when I returned, racing downhill later, I wouldn't run it over.

But on my way back down, it was gone. Spooky!

Next week: enough with the animals, already. Boatbuilding and writing galore.

Spin, my spiders. Spin like the wind!

The NY Times had an article yesterday about -- ready? -- Madagascar Golden Orb Spiders harnessed to tiny silk-extracting machines. The silk is spun into golden thread, which people have then woven into beautiful and costly tapestries.

Unfortunately, when I read "spider harness" I picture a tiny warrior in a Roman chariot, being pulled by an armored war spider. This moth uprising will not stand! To war, my arachnid brothers! Maybe partly due to -- ready? -- cat armor I saw on Laini Taylor's blog. Very cool, though I imagine the martial effect might be lost when the armored cat decided to sit down, raise one armored leg behind its armored ear, and lick its po-po. (First rule of Cat Club: Always stay clean.)

It gets me worrying about the spiders, too. What if, once they realized what they could do as a group, they gave up on gallery-ready tapestries and instead spun a giant web? They're already the size of bats, so I have no doubt that a web as big as, say, a trampoline would serve to hold an entire kindergarten class. And then the golden killers would scurry across the thread, gnashing their spidery jaws and squeaking their horrible spider language.

Where was I? Oh, right. Art from spiders.

Dear slugs: I'm sorry

Slugs of the world: please DO NOT unite!

Recently there was an unfortunate incident involving one of your brethren or sistren or co-unspecified gender on a local gravel road, or paved road, or parking lot. The precise provenance of this ... incident ... remains unclear, for reasons which sadly, will become very clear.

I know, slugs, that you enjoy a good rain. Who doesn't? As long as nasty hard-skinned bipeds don't come out with their tempting bowls of beer, or magnifying glasses, or salt, few things are better than a "stroll" (slide) across a field of wet grass.

Or, presumably, a gravel road.

When said road is winding down great, swooping switchbacks from the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, and somebody -- an innocent victim, no less -- is flying downhill on a new bicycle, it is all he, or she, can do to maintain control and not slide off the shoulder into a tree.

When slug and bicycle meet, there can be only one outcome. Let me point out again that I, I mean someone, is the victim here as well.

Upon returning to his (or her) car, a certain bike rider found something gooey on his bike. It looked like a piece of brown chewing gum. He gamely wiped it off with a piece of gravel.

Then he found another one. And another. And another. Something had spattered the bicycle tube, the pedal, the gears, the back tube, and -- worst of all -- the front of his ankle.

Gritting his teeth heroically, he performed what might optimistically be termed an autopsy only to discover, too late, the horrific truth!

Even worse: an hour of drying air flowing across these ... pieces ... had dessicated them to the consistency of rubber.

What I Did On My Weekend: I accidentally made slug jerky.

Cat barf and line edits

The title says it all. Foamy yellow puddles on the kitchen counter? Check. Full spectrum of manuscript edits, from word changes to character arcs? Check.

I thought about quoting one of the editing notes I write to myself -- how self involved can you be, jeez -- but then realized that in order not to give away even crumbs of the plot, I'd have to black out so much it would look like a post-censored Hoover letter:

"Final XXX/XXX argument: pivotal disagreement. XXX focused on XXX, XXX wants to XXX XXX XXX it is. Stained-glass XXX in XXX. XXX wishes he'd XXX more XXX. XXX XXX at end. Maybe we don't see what XXX XXX through XXX XXX."

See? Useless. No, for now, it is mine, all mine, this tender and raw manuscript. Someday I'll look back at this first draft and think how close it was and how far it was, all at the same time.

But for now: edit edit edit edit edit edit edit.

The Trouble With Reality

I recently read an article in The Economist (14 Feb 2009) that noted a scientific study that found that in the animal world, bigger predators had an advantage ... up to a point. Once they got too big, it's too hard to lug themselves around after smaller and more agile prey.

Now, I'm all in favor of house-sized super-bears and wolves galloping across the tundra like horses, and it's articles like this that spoil everything! Ever since I learned on 3-2-1 Contact that an ant can only get so big (i.e., not very big at all) before it's so heavy that its little stick-legs can't support it, I've been disappointed in science.

But wait: imagine that some predator -- lions, let's say -- evolves bigger and bigger, fiercer and fiercer, faster and stronger. Then when they cross that mass/speed threshold ... they keep getting bigger but now they're getting slower. Socially they're still at the top due to sheer size, but the reality is they need the smaller lions to bring them their food. Bigger. Bigger. Until what you have is a corpulant, fly-swarmed, glistening thing that barely resembles a lion, served by a small and agile corps of sycophants who bring food to the terrible swollen thing out of sheer social necessity. Ha ha, gross; cool! Maybe science isn't so bad.

The image reminds me of the corporate world, where executives -- but no! I mustn't speak ill!

Still, all things being equal I'd prefer to imagine spiders the size of kittens and eagles so big they punch holes in thunderclouds.

What is "A Squirrel in the Chimney," Alex?

Midget assassins
Midget ninjas. Minjas?
Hawks
Bobcats
Firearms instructor friend
Traps
Ladder
Crowbar
Vacuum cleaner
Mittens
Cardboard boxes
A slingshot
Trained spider army

One problem, many solutions.

Here Be Monsters

On the outside of my house, to be specific. This afternoon I watched a praying mantis devour a cicada. This was interesting because the mantis was the size of my finger and the cicada was the size of my thumb.

I bravely crouched down and took pictures, but it turns out they are too horrifying to post, so instead I'll try to describe the situation. Remember, nature can be cruel. And warning: this is horrible.

The mantis grasped the cicada in its front legs. One of the sharp legs had gone through the cicada's wing and pierced its back through; the other had clamped across its face. I bent closer and said, "Oh-". The back of the cicada was gone and it was opened up like a bowl as the mantis chewed, scissoring its heart-shaped head back and forth.

The cicada's gossamer wing was fluttering and humming, and its legs twitched and wiggled as if it was trying to escape the great hook-legged horror that was wetly eating out the back of its head with neither haste nor mercy.

I leaned closer. There was a tiny cracking like matchsticks snapping as the mantis leaned and bit, leaned and bit. Chewed. Leaned and bit. Chewed. The cicada's legs crawled, brushing its hollowed head. Tiny cracklings.

BANG! My wife, inside, rapped on the window above me and for a moment the world was ending because I was the cicada and I was the mantis.

Be glad I have not posted the pictures!

How can I sum all this up in some witty yet meaningful writing advice? I don't know. I've been revising all weekend -- it's getting there! I don't hate it! Much! -- and I have nothing left except the capacity to be horrified and drawn in by a trauma, a drama, a small world I'd never expected and which entranced me. There: isn't that what a good story does?

Ugh. I can still hear the chewing.

p.s. The worst part was that six inches away was the brown husk of the shell the cicada had just emerged from. Not the best timing.

When Animals Almost Attack

I do not live in the wilderness, though I suppose it can feel that way when visitors put on their wading boots to come visit us from the shining land of Oz we call the big city. But we do have a wooded neighborhood that is filled with animals at dawn, when I run through it.

On Tuesday morning I saw a deer in a bush so close I could have reached out and touched it (the deer). Why didn't I? After all, how often do you get to say, "I touched a deer this morning"? Well, I was afraid it would attack. Just a herbivore, you say? Ha! Have you seen a deer up close? Their heads are the size of dog's heads, with long lean snouts and mouthfuls of fangs and/or regular teeth. It could also (I reasoned to myself) spring from the bush and beat me with its head. Or stomp on my ears with its wicked little hooves. No thanks!

Yesterday morning things got even more exciting. I'm always delighted to see bats fluttering in the blue light of dawn, but yesterday one flapped so close I could hear its wings. It sounded like someone shuffling a deck of cards. Then it came back, looped around and came back again. This, quoth I, is not normal bat behavior. Had I become some sort of bat-magnet? Was I emitting bat pheromones? 'Cause it just smelled like sweaty running clothes to me but you never know what's going to activate mad bat lust. After all, perhaps my overwhelming attractiveness cannot be limited to just humanity.

Just as I was feeling pretty studly, it occurred to me that if the bat decided to clamp onto my face, hook its little prickly claws into my ears, and start chewing on my nose? I'm not sure I could stop it. And what if it squeaked a triumphant summons to its bat-friends, and they all fluttered around me like a cloud of dark butterflies and carried me away?

Running is such a calming, meditative time.