Flies

The beautiful sunny mornings of spring have a awoken many things along my canal path route. Daffodils, Primroses and crocusses Croqueses cockasses other flowers are all lining my journey like a crowd of adoring fans (I wave regally at them as I pass). The sexy twinkle is in the eye of the sheep and cows as they pop baby things out of their front bottoms that scuttle and hop under rocks and into the caves where they grow into adulthood. Birds tweet like they are being strangled by invisible Pine Martins, desperate to attract the mate that will bring meaning to their flappy lives.


But there is one thing, or many things, or lots of the same thing, not sure which, that is/are not very nice thing/things that appear also at this season of the year.


And they are FLIES.


Flies, if you are unfamiliar, are little insects that can fly (hence the name, Einstein) and have no purpose on earth other than to hang about in the air around the canal path. This brings them into direct conflict with me. I, if you are unfamiliar with me, am a bicycle riding misanthrope.


Here are some Stat cards for you to cut out and keep:

So what's the worse thing about these airborne flappers? 

Well, it's not that they fly into your eyes and you have to spend hours when you get home picking their corpses out. It's not even when they fly up your nose or straight down the back of your throat causing you to puke your high-energy bike fuel bars up all over Timmy Toddler out for a fun scoot, scooting about on his new scooter with his scooterless family.

No, it's none of these.

It's the way that they dive, kamikaze style at my lips (I even think I heard one buzz "Banzai!" once). 

"That's not so bad, you effin' drama queen" I hear you scream. Well that's because you don't know the thing that I am about to tell you in the next line of this blog that I am writing now. 

I have to cover my lips in Vaseline so the don't dry out on my journeys and the flies become stuck to it and I end up with writhing fly-encrusted mouth parts! 

Dead flies, half dead flies, ones still crawling about amongst their rotting compatriots, all over my mouth!

I try to wipe them away, but that just pushes the fly/petroleum jelly death mix further into my open orifice. I can feel them crawling about as the struggle in their death-throes, desperate for the release of freedom or death.

People point and recoil in horror, fear and despair at the Fly Mouth Man who speaks in buzzing words of death and relentlessly hurtles passed them at speeds so speedy, only the truly damned would pedal at them.

When I arrive home I have to carefully scrape the crust of corpses carefully from my lips with care.

But I tell you, it has worked wonders for my lips, all that fly goo has left me with luscious, ever-so-kissable smackers. If only I could find some way of bottling it and selling it to posh chumps/chumpettes I would probably get rich. 

Or arrested. 

KISSY KISSY!

Heron Hitman

With his black stick legs stuck in the slick black canal water The Heron is the most awesome of all the motherlovin' creatures that litter my path to work. This guy is the coolest Bustard around, never moving a muscle when I pass right next to him on my bicycle-from-the-future. When he is flapping gracefully around in the sky bit of earth he looks so graceful and stuff, but what is best is that he looks exactly like a pterosaur.

He is also a deadly bad-ass hunter that uses total stealth like a Predator from that movie where Arnold Sweatynecker had to fight stuff...er...Kinder Egg Garden Cop-out, or something, I dunno, films confuse me, OK?

Anyway, I was having a lovely ride to work the other day, the spring sunshine was warm on my back as I slid, almost effortlessly, through the air that was in and around the canal path, my legs moving in a furious blur as they pummelled my pedals like two leg-like engines. The breathing gas about me was fresh and clean and I started to feel that the world wasn't maybe completely filled with horror, fear, despair and death, when I suddenly took a turn around a bend into a very dark area of the path.

The ancient trees grow very dense here, bending over to meet each other like sumo wrestlers, across the canal. Twisted gnarled Oaks and Ashes create a tunnel of dire gloom and watching terror that I fear to ride through. This particular morning that place of quiet horror was made all the more terrifying by the presence of a grey figure scampering about in the middle of the path.

When it saw me it stopped its incessant scrabbling and went on it's hind legs to look at me, it's hideous bushy tail shaking with a hideous hideousness that filled me with a hideous feeling, hideously like hideousness. Hideous.

I stopped my, frankly, incredible bike using it's brilliant Magura brakes, the red ones, they are the best, great for dry weather and wet, so easy to change as well, although adjustment can be a bit tricky, but when you've got them set up just nice they are AWESOME TO THE MAX, and stood there looking at the thing of evil blocking my way.

It was then that I saw the others, I had ridden right into a bushy tailed ambush! To one side, next to the canal water was another squirrel, and I can only guess at how many had closed the path behind me, I bet it was loads. Just as I thought this was it for me, and the squirrel I hadn't seen at first was about to pounce on my throat and rip out my veins and arteries and bathe in the shower of blood that erupted from my tubes of life, suddenly a beak like a sword shot out of nowhere and skewered the rodent alive!

The Heron had come to save me! In one incredibly swift motion he flipped the floppy nut-cracker up in the air only for it to land in it's wide-open gobble-chops.

"YEAH! TAKE THAT YOU NUT-NIBBLING TREE HUGGER!" I screamed as loud as my lungs could manage. The relief of not being gutted by some noisome fluffy beasts was quite obvious to the family that had just come up behind me, walking their dogs.

The Heron gulped down his meal and then flew off for an after dinner snooze in a tree or something, I guess, safe in the knowledge that he would always have a friend in me.

Please watch this video I shot as I think it explains a lot:

CLICK THIS TO SEE THE VIDEO IF YOU HAVE A MOBILE DEVICE AND YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO SEE IT ON THE FACEBOOK PAGE

Questionnaire: Are you a Predator or Prey?

Do you have what it takes to take stuff and eat things in this world, or are you just some sort of mamby-pamby loser always losing? Do you live life like danger is something that happens to other people when you dish it out, or is danger something that is dished out to you by people who live life like danger is something that they dish out? If you just got mangled by that sentence don't even bother doing the test, you are prey and I am the word predator! Hahahahah!
A-hem, actually please do the test, I would apologise but that isn't what us predatory 80's guys do, we tell it like it is and if a few pathetic sheep get it in the neck then that's how it is.
Anyways, here's the test:


1: You see some hump-sack wangdangler cycling past your tree. Do you:
   a) Scamper in front of their wheels for no apparent reason
   b) Throw your nuts in their direction
   c) Wiggle your bushy tail in a deeply sensual way and tempt the unsuspecting day-glo toogler up to your treetop lair where you then split them open, run your claws through their innards in sacrifice and praise to Squirrethulu.

2: You are a Floppy-eared Rodent and you have to cross the road to get to some juicy carrots growing on the other side. Do you:
  a) Hop slowly to the centre of the road and wait for the inevitable doom that awaits us all.
  b) Get drunk on nettle wine or whatever shit Rabbits use to get effed up on, steal a car and drive across the road.
  c) Wait for someone who looks like an Bloody Hippy Animal Lover to come pootling along in their clapped-out VW camper van and run out in front causing them to swerve dangerously, spontaneously combust, and plough into a Bus queue. 


3: You are a crow. Do you:
  a) Lose all self respect and get Crusty Jugglers to feed you Sugar Puffs (see 'The Tapping of the Crow' blog entry).
  b) Eat the Rabbit that chose (a) in the previous question, narrowly avoiding getting splatted yourself (see question 2 part a)
  c) Chase some woman who has realised your master is the Antichrist, peck her eyes out so she can't see the tanker truck that smashes into her, smashing her all up in a smashed up way (see 'Damien: The Omen II).

Where the fuggle are my sugar puffs, lady?

4: You are a Crust Juggler's dog living a half feral life on the canal path. Do you:
   a) Spend your days looking soppy, getting strokes off the passing people and carefully pooing where no one will step
   b) Stake out a patch of ground with your wee and poo and woe betide anyone who enters your territory of dog hell
   c) Try and mate with anything alive, especially bicycles. 

4: You are a Magpie and your Magpie pal has just got flattened by a car. Do you:
    a) Cry for a while, then tie a load of flowers to a nearby tree with your beak and place photos of Patchy lovingly there as a shrine of remembrance.
    b) Quickly race to Patchy's nest and 'inherit' all his shiny stuff.
    c) Wait till the car has gone and go and eat Patchy's eyes.


5: You have got to get to work but some lay-about good-for-nothing lazy lay-about Crusty Juggler has left all their dirty crud, dogs and children all over the canal path. Do you:
   a) Slow your bike down and carefully pick your way through, saying a merry "hallo!" to the merry folk, as they ambush you and steal your time by engaging you in a 'conversation'. 
   b) Ride as fast as you like, certainly not slowing down, it's their look out, the path is for everyone and just now that means just you!
   c) Stop your bike and start punching stuff.


ANSWERS:


Mainly (a)'s: You are not long for this world. Your 'why can't we all just get along' attitude will not win you any friends in this dog-eat-person-on-bicycle life. It will just win you a one way ticket to No Breathing Land stopping at Pain Town and Victimsville. PREY.


Mainly (b)'s: Not so bad, you certainly stick up for yourself in the face of some serious provocation, but you lack that true killer instinct it takes to be a total arsehat wrinklehanger. NOT PREDATORY ENOUGH (keep it up, you'll get there in the end, just expunge any last remnants of human decency you have left lurking in the corners of your rotten soul.)


Mainly (c)'s: You are the pinnacle of human dick-swinging evolution, you see what you want, you take it, and if any wobble-faced jibber-jabbers get in your way then it's goodnight for them! Some people may consider you a dangerous premium grade tool, but they are just jealous of your deadly get-ahead attitude. PREDATOR.


All done? Great! Now wiz along with total disregard for other internet users to the Person on a Bicycle Facebook page and enter whether you got mostly (a)'s or (b)'s or whatever on the question thingy there and we will find out whether readers of this blog are a blood-thirsty pack of go-get-em top-of-the-food-chain type Alpha types or just a very small gathering of nicely nice people.

THE TAPPING OF THE CROW

If the weather is crisp and fresh like a new packet of Golden Wonder (and not a pack that has been in a convenience store for 15 years and you were in such a hurry you forgot to check the sell by date and now you feel robbed and are having to eat bendy 'crisps'), nothing can be better than pedalling along the frosty canal path on the way to work. One such early morning presented itself recently and I saw something rather peculiar on that morning that I just mentioned.


I had just gone around a bend and into a rather secluded area of the canal, when I saw a very ramshackle excuse for a boat floating perilously in the black, thick waters, tethered to the bank. From the front of the boat, which was furthest from me and so hidden from my view, I could hear a strange, hollow, eerie tap tap tapping.


As I drew closer, in a mix of horror and fascination, I saw a large coal-black bird rapping it's beak on the glass at the front of the floating Crusty Jugglermoblie. With hideous trepidation I pulled up alongside of the demonic Crow, which ceased its ceaseless tapping and slowly swivelled it's head to stare at me, with it's unblinking jet eyes. It locked me in its feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), egg-laying, vertebrate animal gaze, opened it's beak-like mouth and then uttered what I can only describe as a croaking laugh. 


Was the monstrous Omen star laughing at me? Laughing at my face filled with horror, fear and despair? Laughing at my stupid bike gear I am forced to wear so funt-heads can see me on the roads? Laughing into my very soul, mocking my existence, echoing around the void in my heart?


My questioning was suddenly interrupted by the hatch opening on the boat and a hairy thing emerged clutching a bowl in it's claw.


"There you go, Russell, I've got our Sugar Puffs for you." and it handed the bowl to the embarrassed Crow.
All I can say is that I had the last laugh that day, a full ten minutes of laughing and pointing before the police arrived.

Who's laughing now? Not you, you Budgie banger! It's ME, Person on a Bicycle!