🔭 The snail essay

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The snail essay

by Nicholas De Marino

Let me explain why I’m dangling a five-year-old Czech kid upside-down by his ankles.

Later.

It’s not a Suge Knight sitch’. (Also, never use the word “sitch” ever again.)

Sorry for the snippiness—I’m hungry and jet lagged. Ran out of safe foods. (Recovering bulimic.) Just got back from the States. (Recovering American. Expatriate Travel Review: Enjoy the bread-free bread and ringworm-infected circuses.) Let’s trawl the neighborhood for snails doggy paddling in beer traps. Remember Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke”? (Disordered Book Review: Lowlife hacks with heart. The smaller scale of events helps the character feels hit harder. (Also, never use the word “feels” ever again.))

This is a horrible idea. I recently soured on eating gastropods altogether. (Or in parts.) It was after seeing an OVRO’s-worth of antennae straining through yellow plastic sacks in a Portuguese supermarket. They looked desperate and so alive—mainly because they were so desperate and alive. Still, my inner gardener was aglow. No chance those vegicidal fuckers could besmirch my precious produce from their open-air, not-so-free-range tomb. (Squint real hard, and there’s some allegory at play.)

By the way, Ovro—the Finnish sound artist, not the radio observatory—is posting potent wordage over at dotart.blog/ovro. I reviewed a record of hers for Bad Acid years ago. Probably 2008’s Revisited. (Self-plagiarized Album Review: “Come see Russia and experience the sounds of paranoia, claustrophobia, and alienation!”)

Did you know most snail shells spiral “dextrally”? That’s “clockwise”—“deosil” if you’re Gaelic or bought suggested-retail-price Scott Cunningham paperbacks about one-witch covens from Walden Books in the ‘90s. It’s like nine out of ten of them. (The snails, maybe the witches, too.) The leftovers are “sinister,” so they’re evil. (Check out Douglas Harper’s site, the “Online Etymology Dictionary.” It’s a great starting place for researching etymologies and, if you’re lazy, a great stopping place.)

Turns out there’s a single gene responsible for snail shell spiraling: Lsdia1, which sounds like a portinglês portmanteau for a new psychedelic. This is what we used CRISPR for before Dr. Frankensteining human babies. (Incidentally, your man Victor never finished grad school. So, until the actual University of Ingolstadt starts handing out honorary degrees to fictional characters, never call him “doctor” again. (Harvard College, Yale take note. Given recent defunding, grafting doctorates to fictional characters might be a good PR ploy. I’m available to draft press releases. (Speaking of victims of academic defunding, if anyone needs help with Robotic Process Automation and/or more puns than you can shake a dowsing rod at, Blake Smith of “Monster Talk” deserves a leg up—doctoratlantis@gmail.com. (Oh-oh-oh, and, back on the mad scientist train, someone needs to reunite the cast of the 2000 comedy show “Bruiser” and reshoot the end of the “Get Out of My House” sketch. Frank Show Review: Highly bingeable. Olivia Colman is a national treasure.))))

Anyway, if you’re gonna nosh grocery store snails—you dæmon—regurgitated internet A.I. says you should purge and starve them first. It’s up to you whether or not you make them watch “Starved,” a trigger-happy 2005 sitcom about eating disorders. (Dyscalculic Show Review: Half-accurate, half-hilarious, half-digested.)

What was I on about? Let’s refocus.

Foofaraw's guide to increased snail sympathy:

• That poor, unnamed racing snail in “The NeverEnding Story” has its eyes in the wrong place; they should be at the end of those longer stalks. And sans eyelids. Hell, let’s adopt it and name it “Foofaraw.” It can make friends with Grub. I’ll wait while you update the page on the appropriate Fandom wikis… Wait, it already has a name?! Bgolus. Never mind.
• Gary, of SpongeBob SquarePants fame and captivity, is suffering from clinical zoanthropy. (From etymonline: 1845, from French zoanthrope or directly from Modern Latin zoanthropia, from Greek zoion “animal” (from PIE root *gwei- “to live”) + anthrōpos “man” (see anthropo-). Compare lycanthropy.”)
• Theodore Turbo is a far more likable speed freak than Lightning McQueen. God, I hate that smug, POS car. (Also, never use the initialism “POS” ever again.)

And then there’s snail sex.

Snails roofie each other with “love darts” that inhibit their partner’s natural spermicide as they attempt to impregnate each other in tantric delirium. Nature’s romantic like that. (On a flatworm-related note, don’t Google “penis fencing.” Or do. You do you.) 

Oh yeah—I’m still dangling that little bastard by the ankles. It’s so he can get a better look at the umpteenth snail he stomped.

I’m currently the token Native English Speaker at a Montessori school in Czechia. We’re on a nature walk, killing time until lunch. (Flashback within a flashback: I’m in second grade, and Czechoslovakia just dissolved. My classmate Barbie is crying because she doesn’t know if she’s Czech or Slovakian now. I’m upset no one else is upset about her being upset, which, in hindsight, should’ve been a red flag for the adults in the room. (Semaphoric Nationalism Review: Eighty-six the red, white, and blue. Thirty countries flash those gang colors. They’re as distinctive as a chubby dachshund or a megalomaniacal leader.))

That kid’s still flailing. I tried stamping his foot (gently(-ish)) and yelling “Totéž!”—“The same!”—but homie turned that into a game. He’s a bully and a ringleader and maybe, just maybe, this isn’t really about him. (Also, never use the word “homie” ever again.)

I’m pretty sure I’m doing the right thing, though.

At times like this, I invoke Garth Marenghi—arGh nightMare!—of “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.” (Pennywise Show Review: Horror’s not dead. You’re dead. You’re dead inside.)

“Sometimes you actually have to be a bigot in order to bring down bigger bigots.”

And my cat, Pirkka, just threw up some grass next to me. Let’s call it a day there.