How do you catch a snake in the house

I’m not asking about a symbolic snake,

I’m not inquiring into how to catch a human being ‘a snake’ in your life (house),

or how to catch those psyche snakes which slither inside of you causing you slide down chutes into the murky and complex depths of your issues (although I was thinking about something along those lines when I got distracted by a less abstract concept),

I’m asking about how to catch an actual snake which your cat brought home (as an offering, a trophy or a playmate).

I’m asking about a snake like this one:

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Grass Snake via the RSPB

(because I didn’t have a camera when my cat walked by with one in its mouth and although we have quite a few of these in the garden they’re difficult to capture, especially when you prefer to leave them alone)

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I was lying on the lawn basking in the sudden blazing sunshine and heat which has appeared after a intensely wet and stormy end of Spring and beginning of Summer,

trying to activate my freckles (that’s how be-freckled people get a tan of sorts caused by freckles joining together after a party in the sun – this explanation is for those who are freckleless, don’t understand how friendly freckles work or are scared of such things and consider them to be blemishes) which have long been dormant and may have forgotten how to do their freckling thing,

arguing with myself about the wisdom of being so lazy (when I have so many extracurricular projects I should be doing),

while scribbling notes for a post on a pad (which are almost illegible due to my handwriting looking like a snake trying to make a hasty retreat from a hunting cat),

about happiness and whether something like this:

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… actually works (I’ll never know because I missed the deadline… does missing this kind of deadline mean you get the opposite!? I scrawled quite a lot about the many reasons why I most likely deliberately missed the deadline),

and generally getting annoyed about things which normally annoy me (also known as pet peeves)… when my pet peeved me (not so much peeved as caused me to panic because I knew the snake probably was only playing dead and once she got it in the house she’d let it go and off it would go).

I had probably been in the Sun for a bit too long, I was wearing a hat but it had holes in it and … so do I… so does my house (it has the sort of holes which a small snake loose in it would find and good luck ever finding it).

So… how do you catch something which doesn’t want to be caught?

(And which you’re not entirely sure ever actually made it into the house… I think it did but I was causing such a kerfuffle due to panicking, trying to get to the back door before my cat did which made my cat bolt for the door faster than I could ever bolt… my partner thinks she dropped it before she got in… I’m not so sure about that… however since she isn’t behaving the way that she normally does when one of her live prey is loose in the house… maybe she did drop it before getting inside… hopefully that’s the case but hope is… a bitch sometimes and lulls you into a false sense of security just before something nips you – luckily grass snakes aren’t venomous… if it was indeed as grass snake… doubt creeps in).

Catching a human ‘snake’ is so much easier. Sure, they don’t want to be caught… in the act, but at some point their ego is going need for them to let you know they fooled you because they can’t stand it when people don’t realise that they’re the smartest person in the room, in the house, on the entire planet.

Want to catch a human snake… wait for their ego to do it for you.

Or put a morsel of ‘you think they’re too stupid to fool you or anyone’ in a trap, it’s like peanut butter for rats and mice and other peanut-loving rodents.

Also keep an eye out for the sort of traps which they sneakily set up for you. They’re almost obsessive-compulsive about it because their ego has to keep feeding itself and there’s nothing like catching you being human to give them a feast. They like to poke, prod, and provoke you with little tiny needles, fangs, and them wait for you to say ouch. Haha! You were hurt, you reacted to being hurt, they gotcha!

If you keep an eye out for this kind of thing… you’ll eventually see the pattern of their scales of injustice. It can get tiresome because they’re so addicted to this kind of behaviour of laying the sort of traps for you which you’re bound to fall in because you’re human and then prancing around when they catch you in it… as though the most obvious thing in the world was somehow hidden and they spotted it! Haha! They caught you getting annoyed because they were being annoying! You sneezed when they threw pepper at you, blinked when they clapped their hands in front of your eyes, spoke when they asked you a question, they asked for help and you gave it to them!

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Catching the snakes within, they’re harder than human snakes (at least human snakes who aren’t you) to capture because even though they too have ego as part of their frailty which can be used to lure them out that ego is a part of you too and may protect them as much as it makes them vulnerable.

We always have excuses for the slithering, slipping, sliding, side-widing which we do… we just don’t allow others to use those excuses when they do the same shit that we do, yet we expect others to let us use what they’re not allowed to use… because that’s the nature of the inner snake.

Which is very different from real snakes… if they knew all the symbolic stuff we apply to their kind they’d… Ah! That’s probably part of the reason they avoid us when they can and bite us when avoiding us fails. The really venomous and aggressive snakes are done with how we use them! They’re not putting up with our human snake shit anymore (than they have to).

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liz climo

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