Language, kerosene and the snake

 Bloody snakes ... this time of year I'm very glad for the sliding glass doors at my house. I can see what's outside before I go lurching out in bare feet. The front door is north facing and so it is a happy place for snakes to power up their solar energy in the mornings.

There's been a tiger snake hanging around there for the last week, which usually sidles into the geraniums when I open the door. But yesterday it just lay in the grass, all quiet. I was doing my laundry when I saw it through the glass door. I opened the door and threw a cake of soap at the snake. It didn't move. Flies and ants hung on it's ready-to-moult roughened skin. I threw my machete next (it's by the front door for this purpose) but the blade landed nearby and still the tiger didn't move. I thought, maybe it's dead? After all, the insects are loving this critter. Just to be sure, I found my ging and loaded it with lead pellets. Scatter shot was my next weapon. Unfortunately the rubber on the highly illegal ging busted and there were lead pellets all over the laundry floor. I picked them up and threw them at this bloody snake. 

'There are so many places to go!' I yelled. 'Just fuck off, will ya.' 

Finally, throwing a whole shovel did the trick. Snakes don't like shovels, apparently. They are fine with soap, machetes and buckshot but shovels ... whoa. Snake slid off into the geraniums like a gangster.

'My least favourite season around here is summer,' a surfer colleague said to me recently. 'There's shit surf, there's bushfires and then there's the tiger snakes.' 

I sprayed kerosene around the front door, not because I wanted to burn the house down to get back at the snake (though tempting), but because I know these critters absolutely hate petrochemicals. My latest plan is also based on Foucault's 'language as power' theories: I'll call this serpentine visitor Miss Nope Rope McDanger Noodle in order to curate a casual 'irreverent' vibe -where the snake's power as the personification of evil, death and The Fall is nullified by my excellent sense of humour.

So far, this is working.