But if you want a lasting relationship to remain exactly that, you'll have to feign interest in your partner's hobbies and needs. So Claire pretends she gives a crap about that F2P game I'm writing about to pay our bills and I listen to her snake stories. And just in case Claire's mum reads this: Don't worry, we're not really that shallow. We love each other very much.
From what I have learned, the thrill about owning a reptile isn't always just about them being rare, special or unusual in some way. In fact, with all the exotic pet shops and whole chains of shops selling lizards and snakes around here, pet reptiles simply aren't as rare as you might think. The Brits are waaay beyond that. Just the other day I saw a guy walking down the street with an owl on his shoulder!
The real fascination with reptiles is often about being manly and hardcore, the top of the scale being folks, who crave to possess a deadly, venomous snake. And that's a thrill, which I'll never be able to fully understand. Think about it. There's this animal out there, which only wants to do one thing and that is to fucking kill you! And it's more than capable. In fact, it could easily kill you ten times over. Call me a pussy, but my sense of self-preservation tells me it's a good idea to stay away from that kind of animal. And then there are people, who want to be as close to that thing as possible, own it, make it their pet, feed it and risk their lives every single time they go anywhere near it.
I was told it's not any more or less dangerous than crossing a busy road - you might get hit by a car any day of your life. That may be true, but I only cross the road when I actually really have to. I don't put the road and the traffic in my living room, I don't show it off to my friends and I'm not trying to feed it with rodents. I stay the fuck away from it whenever I can. Because, all things considered, life is actually pretty fun and I intend to enjoy it for a little while longer.
The slightly less hardcore reptile fan would probably go for a monitor. Just imagine a lizard the size of a medium dog. I have seen people walking those on a leash, some of them keep them in their living rooms like a cat or a dog and for the most part, I can understand why that would be a pretty cool thing to do. But I have also seen them taking a shit. See, that's another thing with reptiles. If they need to shit, they shit. My cat craps in a little plastic box. We have an agreement there - she exclusively craps in the box and nowhere else and every now and then I clean it up. We can both live with that. A lizard doesn't crap in a box or bark or scratch the door when it wants out. A lizard doesn't want out. If it wants to take a massive shit right on your living room carpet, then that's where it's gonna happen. And believe me - you've probably never smelt anything so unpleasant.
At the bottom of the scale you'd find the wussy reptile lovers. People with geckos and garter snakes and harmless little critters, which are still enough to scare anyone with a phobia, but they can't really hurt you. Actually, that's pretty cool about some snakes - the bite of a smaller one doesn't hurt any more than an average cat scratch, but they inject a bit of venom, which makes you bleed like a pig. Imagine that kind of thing happening with your friends watching and then you can act like it's a really big, nasty, gaping wound and act all tough about it and pretend you're handling a really dangerous animal and everybody will be really impressed.
But come on. That snake is never going to fetch a stick for you, it won't recognize its own name (they can't hear you), it never does anything cool and just sits in a tank all day. I don't know whether snakes are happy or sad with a life like that. I don't think anyone does, because it's not like they have any means of showing any moods or emotions other than 'get the fuck away from me!' So you just look at them. You remove their crap. You brag to your friends when they bite you. Many of them don't even bite you at all.
Let's recap for a sec: I don't wanna die, so I don't want venomous snakes. I don't like massive lizards taking a shit in the house, so I don't want those, either. And small snakes are like Paris Hilton - fun to look at when you're into that kind of thing, but completely and utterly useless.
Of course I don't hate reptiles and I do understand the fascination with them. Just owning one is like the ticket to a special club. Reptile owners talk about their pets, their rare and special breeds, the biggest and deadliest animals they have, they like to show them off, brag about them... it works a bit like a Harley Davidson fanclub, minus all the faggy leather outfits. Own one and you automatically become part of something big. Unless you're getting a gecko or some shit. It's just not a club for me. I'm not the target audience. Well...
Then there was Chompy.
Chompy is a bearded dragon. Bearded dragons are only about a half unit above geckos on the hardcore scale, so they're really not dangerous or impressive enough to raise your manliness level. They grow up to be the size of an average French bread, so they're not designed to become very threatening. On the plus side, it means you can slam-dunk them in their tanks or some other safe environment if they prepare to take a shit on your carpet. Now try that with a nile monitor!
More importantly, they're actually pretty clever and active. For lizards, anyway. They're not going to invent faster than light space travel anytime soon, but they jump, climb, play and do all kinds of freaky shit that's entertaining to watch and goes beyond a snake's yawn-stretch-coil-eat-poop-sleep routine. I've seen one of them putting on a little top hat, twirling a stick and doing the happy dance. Okay, I made that one up, but I like the idea.
So one day when I was hanging out with Claire in the shop and had a look around the many reptile tanks, Chompy would run up and down the window, scratch the glass and when we let her out, she jumped me and climbed on my shoulder. Several times, actually. Now I am fully aware that the lizard would have jumped any other random fat idiot, who might have been there at that moment, but I happened to be the lucky one that day.
And when you have 200 Quid burning a hole in your pocket, all this stuff about not liking reptiles and about not wanting to be on the bottom of the hardcore scale won't stop you from purchasing a spiked poop-machine, which enjoys parking its colour-shifting ass on you.
Ironically, she is the coolest pet I ever had. I've grown up having plenty of cats - those of you who know me IRL or on Facebook have endured their billions of pictures and videos. My family had this massive fish tank and at some point we had this really awesome killer lobster, which loved cutting all our fish in half. Turns out many of them can actually live on for quite some time when they're missing their rear half. We also had this incredibly stupid, annoying, smelly golden retriever, which was enough to make me hate dogs for the rest of my life. Gerbils, rats, zombie snails, I've had them all. I ate quite a lot of exotic animals, too, but that's a different story.
We take Chompy pretty much everywhere we go. Supermarket, family dinners, the occasional barbecue session, it really doesn't matter. If I'm there, the lizard is there, too. I've done that with rats before. In fact, I used to take my pet rat to school with me. Rats are fun, clever pets, too, but they're not anywhere near as cool as they're cracked out to be. First of all, they stink. Look, I appreciate all you rat lovers out there, but rats stink of piss, no matter how clean you say they are, no matter how well you look after their cage, they stink of piss and they stink a lot! And that's because they piss a lot. All the time. Everywhere. It's their thing. Rats like to piss.
Even if you somehow manage to teach them the fine art of bladder and bowel control, it's a wasted effort, because 2-3 years later, they usually grow horrible, nasty tumors, which can easily rival the entire rat in size. I don't want to grow fond of some semi-intelligent animal, only to watch it die when I'm finally done potty-training it.
I suppose dogs make better travel companions than rats, but aside from the fact that they're drooling morons, they're just not allowed anywhere! I can't take my dog with me to watch a movie, I can't take a dog inside a shop - nobody gives a shit if I bring a lizard. And my lizard doesn't stink of wet dog when it rains. My lizard doesn't fucking bark at other lizards. And my lizard doesn't try to eat the faces of random children when they try to pet it.
Alright - Chompy tried to kill the cat when we went to see Claire's family today, but that was actually pretty fun to watch. She had a good look around the place, met some strange new people and by the end of the day she just fell asleep on top of me. We took her on the bus when we got there. We also had one of our cats on the bus once and that was absolutely NOT fun.
Unlike our cats, our lizard will never come running when I call her name. She won't hunt down any toy mice, fetch sticks or shake hands. But she climbs right onto my hand when I open up her tank, I can take her everywhere I go and one day I'm gonna put a video of her on youtube, as she is riding a very scared cat.
I'm just glad that boas, pythons and monitors don't jump random pet shop visitors and suck up to them to find new homes. Our place is turning more and more into a zoo.
-Cat
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