Cold-Blooded Love

Yesterday I mentioned on my Facebook fan page the burgeoning romance my wife and I have been lately tracking between two lizards who seem to have decided that our front patio is their Garden of Cretin.

Above is a photo I snapped of one of our tongue-flicking paramours. It fails, of course, to convey the scale of this scaly wall-scaler. But a quick guess I made as I was running away screaming after the thing moved right toward me is that it measures about six feet long, and weighs around 120-150 pounds. I'm pretty sure that's right.

It's basically Godzilla without the dynamite posture.

Of the two lizards, I believe this one to be the male, because it seems pretty stupid. That's not the only reason I think it's the male--a guy myself, I'm hardly into male-bashing--but this reptilian Romeo seems, even by lizard standards, distinctly dense. He's always looking for the female lizard. (She, by the way, has a shorter, wider head; nowhere near the happenin' scale patterns of this sartorial scurrier; and a relatively short and absolutely patternless gray tail that's clearly grown in replacement of her original tail, for which some bungler of a bird probably had to settle. The message her new tail seems to have arrived with is, "Why bother growing a pretty one, if you're just going to keep losing them anyway?")

When the dapper Eddie Lizard here finally finds the female for whom he's clearly been searching, he gets really weird. He does push-ups; he seems to try to hypnotize her by weaving his head back and forth in a way that makes you think if you got real close to him you'd hear him declaring, "Oh, no you dit ent"; he sort of bends himself into weird shapes, as if he's saying, "Check it out. Jazzy good looks and almost spineless. Talk about fun, right?"

And the whole time he's doing all that, she just expressionlessly stares at him, like, "Great. You can move your head. That's wonderful. There's nothing like a neck. Should I leave and come back, or are you about done doing whatever it is you're doing?" So then he finally stops being weird, and they stare at each other for a minute; and then she steps toward him---and I'm thinking it's time to dim the porch lights, and pop inside to put on the stereo a little of that lounge music I know lizards dig---and then he leaves. He just gets this glazed, "What was I doing, again?" look on his face, and the next thing you know, he's wandering away. At first he looks like he's drifting off in spite of himself--like he doesn't really want the interaction to stop, but somehow can't control his slow turning and walking away---but then something catches his attention---an ant, a gnat, me yelling at him to go back---and then that becomes the new thing he's into. He totally forgets her.

Until, that is, the next time he's desperately trying to find her, so that he can show her how he's learned to lick his eyeballs, or break-dance, or whatever.

If he doesn't catch a clue pretty soon, I might take Mr. Laggin' Dragon into my house, sit him down, and talk to him. We'll have drinks: me, an Appletini; him, a nice drop of pureed flies. Maybe share some barbecue cricket wings.

I don't know exactly what I'll say to him. But it'll be something real, something heartfelt, something designed to motivate him to get back out there, find that girl, and stop with the bending and bobble-heading.

I don't mind doing it. As a higher order of life, it's the least I can do. We guys---no matter where we are on the food chain, no matter how evolved we happen to be---have got to help one another out, whenever and however we can.