Slugs

I've been trying to explain about the slug in my hair for a while now.

Admittedly there are a lot of things I've been trying to explain, lately. There's the fact that I've moved, for one thing. Before that, there was this whole arson thing (funny story. Really. I'll get around to that someday. Maybe.) And then there was the trip to Italy, which I'll write about as soon as I finish fixing up the pictures.

The slug, though. This was special. It's not often that things happen to me. Most of the interesting stuff I write about is stuff that happens to people around me. This is inevitable, when placed in context with my family. My mother and my sister are people who invite weirdness. They wallow in strangeness; they inhale the odd and exhale the bizarre. Me, I'm like the spoon in the Ben & Jerry's research lab. I may touch and taste the exotic flavors of Strawberry-Salmon Sherbert, but I'll never be the Strawberry-Salmon sherbert.

As a story, it's fairly short. I was outside. I ran a hand over my hair. There was a slug in it. It squirmed. I flicked it out. It slithered away. I went home and washed my hair. End of story. Not, I admit, a gripping narrative. However, it's one of those things that start getting a little strange after you've thought about it for a while.

Well. Okay. Maybe even before you've thought about it for a while.

Slugs are sort of a cultural heritage for me. I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Slugs are a thing there. We know slugs. We have, in our time, squashed them, dehydrated them, poked them, played with them, even -- once upon a time and let's not linger on this more than is strictly necessary -- eaten them. What we have never, ever done is seen a slug fly.

This sort of begs the question, what strange convulsion of physics and biological improbabilities would result in a slug landing on my head? Seagull droppings, I could understand. There are seagulls to be seen from time to time up in the sky. Perhaps (and this is still a remote possibility, but nonetheless feasible) a chunk of frozen waste dropped from a passing plane. Our new offices are near San Jose Airport. There are planes. They fly. This, I could understand. But a flying slug? Is this some new perversion that nature has seen fit to inflict on us? Or are they jumping now like frogs, bounding across Northern California in great, graceful leaps in search of more fertile hunting grounds and nubile mates with which to frolic in connubial bliss?

My coworkers are inclined to think I am making the entire thing up. "A slug?" one says, baffled. "Are you sure you weren't mistaking it for something else?"

"Like what?"

"Maybe it was a ... grasshopper?"

I've come to the conclusion my coworkers don't have a high opinion of my intelligence.