A Pet Called Peeve

A peeve is a vexation. A pet peeve is a vexation that nips at your metaphysical ankles and wets on the sateen pillows of your soul. I hate pet peeves.

One of my most ferocious pets called peeve is toenail clippings. They’re ugly, grubby, and seemingly everywhere. I can take the craziness of reality television (almost), the injustice of modern American tax brackets (with rancor), and the relentless optimism of Madison Avenue marketing tactics (I’m being vaccinated) but I CANNOT take detached toenails. 

It’s a pet peeve of mine.

Once I stood on the second floor of our two-story foyer and looked over the banister, only to see a wad of clipped toenails mounded in a tiny pile below me in the front hallway. Those toenails were not mine. As I stared down, I concluded that some unknown toe-groomer had been clipping their toenails on the second floor landing only to send their trimmings cascading down to the hallway below.

I also concluded that I might, quite possibly, be living with Visigoths.

The same week, I began stretching for my Tae Kwon Do class only to come face to face with several detached toenail clippings—less than a micron from my personal face. They were not mine.  This meant that someone (probably a Visigoth) thought it a great idea to groom their shaggy toenails while practicing martial arts.

During class, I worked out my horror by punching and kicking the dummy, shaped like a Anglo Saxon/Hun invader, extra hard.

Soon after, I spent a few days in a Florida hotel, and you guessed it—toenail clippings—on the carpet, next to the bed. They were not mine. I tried not to black out.

But the worst was what I like to call “The Popeye’s Affair.”  Standing in line, waiting to purchase the best and greasiest fast food chicken ever, I glanced down and spotted—a lone toenail, missing its foot.

Looking at my husband, I pointed and choked out, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep, that’s a toenail.” He ordered the three-piece chicken dinner, extra grease.

A thousand questions popped into my head:  How did the toenail get there? How did it get out of its shoe? Was the toenail running away? What kind of barbarian clips their toenails in line at a fast food joint? Can the second Middle Ages be far off?

Civilization is a fragile agreement between individuals, consisting of written and unwritten rules, one of which is: “Thou shalt not discard bits of ones self where others can find those bits—ever!”  It’s vile.

Let me conclude by saying, “Keep toenail clippings in their place and out of my sight,” and if you know who is clipping their toenails on the landing in my house, do the right thing, and TURN THEM IN. I’ll have DNA testing done, if I have to.  You know I will.

 Linda (Vexed and Peevish) Zern              

CULTURE OVER EASY

The tree trunks here in Melbourne, Australia are wrapped with metal guards. This is the kind of thing that gets my husband and I curious when we travel. Forget the museums, forget the art galleries, forget the fireworks display every Friday night over the River Yarra.  What’s with the tree tin? That’s the real Australia. You can just feel it.

As we ride around the city we develop theories.

“They’re to keep the squirrels out of the trees,” I speculate.

“But where else are the squirrels going to live if they don’t live in trees? Telephone poles?”

“Good point,” I conceded. “How about it’s to keep crazy crap out of the trees. You know like those bear things.”

“Koala bears? No way. You’d think they’d want a koala hanging off of every tree branch. Think of the tourist dollars.”

“Good point.” We continued to scratch our American heads.

Finally, Sherwood asks the cab driver, “What’s with the tree tin?”   

Cabbie tells Sherwood, "That's to keep the possums out of the trees."

"Why don't you just shoot them?" asks Sherwood (Dead Eye) Zern, of Saint Cloud, Florida, near Kissimmee, home of the Silver Spurs Rodeo.

"Because the government took our guns, and we'd get in trouble with the animal people," cabbie says.

"In America, we'd just shoot them."

"In America, you shoot everything."

It’s hard to know where to go from this point in the cultural exchange: to be more curious about the enormity of the problem Australians are facing with pesky possums colonizing city trees, or offended at the gross ignorance and prejudice on the part of the cabbie about our American way of life. I’ll address both.

One) How big are these possums? How mean? What happens if they climb up in those trees? What are the possums tossing at people from up there that makes the citizens of Melbourne have to take such drastic tree trunk wrapping action? Where do the possums go if they don’t go up those trees? Telephone poles?

Two) It is simply not true that Americans “shoot everything.” We don’t shoot roaches. That would be counter-intuitive. We pour gallons of poison over them as if basting tiny turkeys. We don’t shoot the mailperson. We give the mailperson twenty bucks at Christmas and thank her for not throwing our mail in ditches. We don’t shoot the computer. We want to. We want to real bad, especially when it seizes up and threatens to meltdown IN CHINESE.

Possums? Possums we shoot. Especially, when they climb in the chicken coop looking to rape and pillage and thieve eggs. Then possums are going down—American style. Come to think of it, that’s why we wrap sheet metal around the bottom of our chicken coops to help keep nasty possum types out.

Hey! We’re not so different after all.

It’s a small, possum troubled, world after all.

Linda (Foreign Exchange) Zern

PS  Australian possums look like something you win for your kid at a carnival. Adorable. Florida possums look like something in the freak show at the carnival. Prehistoric and toothy. Very toothy.

QUICKIES: Postings that are Short and Sweet

HAVE YOU SEEN ME? ONE EXCELLENT DOG!!

So, my husband and I are in Australia for three weeks. And while in Australia my daughter posts on Facebook that she lost my dog for a day or two. No worries. The dog's probably out looking for Australia, says my smart aleck daughter.

This upsets me. This is a good dog. This is one of those dogs that would drag you from a burning building kind of a dog. Not a hobo dog by any means.

Then she posts, "She's back. All is well."

I'm a sceptic. I demand proof of life. I want a picture of the dog holding a newspaper with the current date.

She says (my daughter not the dog) that newspapers are extinct. No such beast.

She has me there.