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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Yap: Chuckwalla
By Januar Yap
Meanwhile
He’d been sending Anti-Arroyo text messages, so I figured I’d better sit down with him and hear what he had to say.
“Listen,” he said as he fixed his eyeglasses perched almost at the tip of his nose, “zoology is no different from sociology.”
I took a hearty swig. We got a George Orwell here, somebody grab this man a bottle.
“Everything that unfolds everyday, what you read in the papers, they’re all explained in the animal ecosystem,” he said. This
guy is a biologist, he had spent more time counting insect legs and measuring salamander girth than brushing his teeth. But
this one reads the papers, which explains his oblique way of looking at things.
Mr. Orwell was getting excited. “Have you seen a chuckwalla?”
“A chuck what?” I asked.
“From the iguana family, a lizard.”
George Orwell wrote the “Animal Farm,” a novel with fantastic animal characters that do political legwork.
“It’s a lizard with an insatiable taste for oregano and thyme and spearmint and basil, in other words, a herbivore,” he said.
Okay, go on.
“But that’s not the story. Pursued, the chuckwalla retreats into a cranny, inflates its lungs so large it would be impossible to
pull it out.”
Okay, so what’s the point?
“GMA is as guilty as the chuckwalla,” he declared. “She’d inflated herself so large she can’t be pulled out of the crevice.”
He grabbed his bottle looking less tense, perhaps believing he’d made his point. “What do you think?” he broke the silence.
Oh, don’t ask me, I said. Just tell me more about the chuckwalla.
“Well, it goes by the classification Sauromalus obesus,” he said.
“Can’t you get the hint? It rhymes with anomalous and obscene!”
Let’s have one for the road, pare. Have to go somewhere. “Okay,” he said, “one for the road.”
Chuckwalla, huh. Man.
(August 25, 2005 issue)
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