My company

Having lived alone a long time now, I've decided that I'm pretty good company to be around. I'm certainly able to stand being by myself for very long stretches of time, so I guess that says something. It helps to be at a stage of life where I've traveled a lot, read even more, and have learned to relax and let things flow.

When I'm on my own, I sometimes talk to myself, only instead of using one voice, I use three different ones: I/me, we, and you. I call them my ego, id, and external governor states. "I need to clean the floor, it's getting disgusting." "You haven't made your bed in a couple of days . . . you're slipping." "It's time we had some fun around here, girlfriend. All we do is work, work, work!" Get the picture?

I also talk to the various critters who live in and around my house. Lizards, white toads, spiders, millipedes, mongoose, birds, etc. They all make me laugh, even when the millipedes get in my underwear box and curl up and die. The places I sometimes find these little guys are amazing. They are total acrobats, able to climb vertical walls, cantilevered ceilings, into cupboards and drawers, even out of the toilet!

Last night, an especially large lizard slipped in and perched way up on the beam that runs along the top of the wall. Lizards are NOT allowed to stay overnight. They tend to become permanent guests, and eventually I find their little dessicated bodies in a corner or behind a book. Most upsetting, the death of a lizard. So I went outside and found a long stick. One little poke along the beam from where he was casting a leary eye at me, and he ran right back outside where he belongs.

Giant centipedes, on the other hand, get shrieked at as I wildly look around for something to stomp them with. They are truly bad dudes, and I dread getting bit (stung?) by one of them. My landlady works outdoors all the time, and recently she was bitten right on her face by one of these nasty arthropods. My mother was once bitten by a brown recluse spider. She had a large, scaly patch of skin on her leg the rest of her life. From stories I've heard about centipede bites, I'm not sure which is worse.