At Least There Isn't A Camel in my Apartment

A considerable amount of my spare time seems to be taken up dodging insects.  I've mentioned before that my apartment seems to be a kind of locus for the more mentally retarded members of the insect community and now we can add crickets to the list.

I like hearing crickets chirruping as I walk past parks or pieces of bushland in the evening.  The sound is rhythmic and soothing.  It's a lot less pleasant when the crunchy little bugger is inside your apartment less than a metre from your head.  The noise was driving me batty and I searched for a while trying to find the cricket and I will confess that my thoughts were not entirely pacifistic.  Just as I was about to give up the search the cricket cleared things up nicely by flying directly into my head and bouncing off my skull.  I'm not sure what happened to it after that but it stopped chirruping so I'm going to count it as a win.

Having liberated my apartment from the chirruping hordes I celebrated by having a bit of a tidy up.  I do this periodically, usually to give me somewhere to put something else down.  My apartment is predominantly mess with the occasional oasis of tidiness.  This oasis isn't static, it moves about depending on where I am and what I need to do at any given time.

On the subject of oases I can't help thinking that the real ones have been a blight on humanity ever since their inception.  What is an oasis after all?  Its a tiny patch of life supporting land surrounded by desert.  Without oases a desert is unlivable so people don't try to live there.  Add a few oases, however and the whole complexion changes.  Suddenly the desert goes from total death trap to just barely viable and that is all the encouragement that the human race needs.

Suddenly the desert was overrun with just slightly more people than its resources could sustain.  These people lived a desperate, marginal life winding their way from oasis to oasis fighting over the rights to these precious life giving specks in the vast emptiness.  Oh yes, and domesticating camels.  If there is one thing above all else that oases should not be forgiven for it is the fact that they prevented us from simply killing every camel on sight.  Camels must be the smelliest, surliest, most bad tasting animal on the planet.  I'm pretty sure they only allowed themselves to be domesticated in the first place so that they were better positioned to piss us off.  Let's face it, if any non domesticated animal behaved the way camels do we would have hunted them to extinction years ago.

So; poverty, tribalism, warfare and the continued existence of camels.  For all this oases are to blame.  Frankly they should be banned.