Some that are mad if they behold a cat

Ass-Loving Bottom: Look, is there no animal I can disdain? What about ticks? Or perhaps I will be allowed to malign certain plants? Poison ivy? What about fictional creatures? Can I disrespect Nazgul? Triffids? Body-Snatchers? Must I be in every way like that fellow above?

   The other day a small lizard got into our apartment, and I spent an hour trying to catch the little guy so I could release him into the wild (or at least onto the little patio in back), so he could have his sunbeam, his bugs to eat, find the love of his life, create progeny, be happy. I named him ("Lisbon"), talked to him, and imagined running out and buying a terrarium for him so I could keep him forever, then decided that would be cruel (and would involve my having to purchase bugs to feed him). Once outside, Lisbon, like all his friends, happily sat in the sunbeam, and eventually disappeared under the copious leaves of a flower I planted and have watered and tended tirelessly since I got here.

   What a charming, Edenic picture! And in that same garden, the size of a deluxe knock-hockey set, I have also woken to baby rats, shriveled and dying in the sunshine (they look for all the world like human fetuses of a certain period), and yesterday I removed with a shovel some huge, oddly heavy, and in any case horrible bulbous white fungus growing in the same flowerbed where I had planted one of my new charges. Even Adam would have shivered. There's a Melville story called "The Plaza," and it is of course about the Fall and all that, but does it ever seem to be about human discomfort with nature, specifically with vermin. I have rarely read a truer story (and full of Spenser references, whee!). The nausea the story triggers in the reader is not some transcendental artifice; it's nature pure and simple, the author working his way back through the man-made plaza to the intolerable nature infesting it.

   When I was young my grandfather would take me fishing. I could not bring myself to impale the shrimp on the hook. I could not because I felt sorry for it, and imagined myself as a shrimp (my man Frank Black, too, has put himself in that exoskeleton). Another time, my grandfather had bloodworms for bait. I could not bring myself to impale even a single worm on the hook. Why? Because they are disgusting, bloated, nauseating creatures. It's not that I will have no truck with them, it's that I can't. Even Adam, apparently, gave them a creepy name.

   I wonder, as Shaw plunged into the ocean with a unlovable, proto-vegan grunt, did he for a moment fear getting stung by some puffy, purple, proto-ziploc, unlovable man-o-war?

   I actually dream of getting a cat. One of these days. But I understand, admit, and respect Shylock's incapacity to love them. He has enough to do to love his own daughter and his own self.

   But I already urged Slothrop to change my blogging name to Shylock. The Ass-Head has departed for now, like the Blatant Beast before him. I'm nursing my grudges for next season.