Just a Few Days Ago, It Was Grecian Wranglers

Rick and I were chatting this morning, as we often do when he's had just enough coffee to string sentences together and I haven’t yet been pulled into some digital rabbit hole. He told me he'd seen a lizard he’d never seen before. It looked like a snake at first—long tail, body hidden in the brush—but then, as it slithered (or maybe tiptoed?) out a bit, it had tiny legs.

“Tiny legs,” he said, demonstrating with his fingers. “Like... unnecessarily small legs.”

Naturally, I suggested it might be a defense mechanism—look like a snake, freak out predators. But no, he said, that wouldn’t work. Any predators would eat a snake that size, too.

“Okay,” I said, “maybe it’s supposed to look like a venomous snake. Fake 'em out with danger.”

Still no. “It’s just black,” he said. “Not scary. Just… leggy.”

Well then. The only logical conclusion left: it must be a previously undiscovered type of reptile. A transitional creature. A snake that turns into a lizard. Like a tadpole situation.

Something Charles Darwin would’ve had a field day with.

You’d think I’d just said the moon was made of yogurt.

Yogurt Moon

He scoffed. Dismissed it entirely. Said I was being ridiculous.

This, from the same man who, just a couple of days ago, gave serious thought to the idea of Grecian Wranglers—Greek Spartans who traded their linen chitons and bronze greaves for denim jeans, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hats so they could bravely wrangle the Minotaur out of his Cretan labyrinth, drag him to the surface, sail across the Mediterranean, and lock him up in a second, more dust-covered labyrinth under Egypt. You know. Like one does.

That idea? Worth deep consideration. Possibly a screenplay.

But a snake evolving into a lizard with useless legs?

Unthinkable.

I guess we all draw the line somewhere.