The death of a cricket

Brushing my three years olds teeth this morning I catch sight of quite a ‘meaty’ looking cricket squatting in the shower. My normal modus operandi would be to translocate the transgressing invertebrate back out into the garden via the closest window. But today I scoop it up and toss her¹ to the Maine Coon…

[1] I feel fairly confident I am not misgendering said cricket due to its long ovipositor. I don’t want to get a memo from anyone. Not today at least.

It is not a good death, the cat torturing the hapless creature to death for the next five minutes. Maybe longer.

I almost immediately regret my decision. Although apparently not enough (in a very alea iacta est kinda way) to attempt a rescue. I still bear the rake marks that testify to a recent encounter where I tried to pry a baboon spider² out of of the cats maw. (as a point of interest the baboon spider did not make it… and was, at one point, flung at me. My wife likes to gleefully dramatize that this elicited quite a high pitched sound out of me, a recollection I obviously dispute)

[2] Basically an Africanized tarantula

I sometimes wonder how I would have behaved during the Standford prison experiment. Or as a newly minted adult assigned somewhere like Dachau. (I like to believe a slightly older me might have been more resistant to certain workplace experiences… but who knows, I did just recently act quite callously towards another living creature, isn’t it a slippery slope, and aren’t most of us, as the Standford experiments might allude to, just a sliver away from full-blown sociopathy?)

I understand why the Germans in Art Spiegelmans seminal work are cats though. Although there is (apparently) controversy as to why other ethnic groups got the representations that they got.

Spiegelman agonized whether to portray his French wife as a ‘French’ frog… or a ‘Jewish’ mouse (she converted to Judaism) and dedicated a page to it three quarters of the way through his book.

… spoiler alert, in the end she makes into the panels as a mouse. But I find the concept of anthropomorphism and identity quite interesting.

I remember taking a cemetery tour in Johannesburg once. The Jewish section fascinated me, insofar as it was explained to me that, Jewish men were buried here, Jewish women over there… and converts to Judaism over yonder.

Personally, I’m not much for getting put into a hole in the ground. I’d much rather have my ashes shot off into space (that way I don’t have to worry about who I might be buried next to). I think I might like, one day, to be an orbital hazard. Or, if I manage to clear the earths gravity (probably the better option) to become a piece of space flotsam, destined to drift forever in the void. Well, until the universe contracts again (assuming it does). I might like to get back to the source before my peers (I am weirdly competitive), given the head start I could potentially get and the years of (hopefully) undisturbed acceleration, I could pip them to the post. To infinity. And beyond.

In any event I feel personally chastised enough that I probably won’t be tossing anymore crickets (or anything else) the way of the murder machine (for the next while anyway). She can do her own killing and I will return to a blissful state where I don’t overthink cat ownership. Or maybe its human servitude, its never entirely clear cut who is actually in charge. Like I said, best not to dwell on it. That or your capacity for casual cruelty.

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