[2010 P.S.: Most of the pics I used are gone now. Some I replaced, others I couldn't. Sorry.]
THE MONARCH DREAM
I had the strangest/coolest dream last week.
[I found this by searching 'strangest dream'. You'd think it'd come up under 'coolest dream']
As some of you may know, I have been a fan of the Monarch butterfly for many years now, ever since I was but a lad. I read up on them, raised them, even helped tag them now and then. Possibly my favorite animal on the planet.
(My dream vacation is to go to that forest clearing in Mexico where the Monarchs spend the winter. Well, that and a total solar eclipse. Of course, if I had the good fortune to be at the Monarchs' winter spot during a total solar eclipse there, I could die then and there with a smile on my face.)
[Actually, this COULD happen in 2024!]
But I don't think I ever had any kind of Monarch dream, that is to say, a dream that features Monarchs, let alone the fucked-up episode I dreamed on this night.
By the way, yes, I know what you're thinking, "Monarch Dream" is one hell of a great band name, and it is, I acknowledge that, but let me take just a mo to explain to you just why...
Working-class schlubs like you and me, we often dream of things we don't have. "I wish I could hit the lottery or make a killing on some bold new internet investment or patent the world's first iPod that performs oral sex (I think I'd call it 'blowPod'), and get me a nice big house and a nice car, yadda yadda yadda."
[So I searched for 'blow pod' and I found this pic. Strangely, it seems very accurate.]
But what if you're a monarch? (Royalty, I mean, not a butterfly.) You already have a freakin' mansion and a hot queen with a sweet ass and a private jet a closet full of a couple thousand pairs of shoes and a dozen or so blowPods (you know, for parties), what more could you want? What do you dream of? "You know, this is all great and all, but I sure wish Jann Arden lived next door and came over to our yard every day and made out with my hot wife half-naked under the sprinklers before we slip into my giant hot tub and indulge in some fantastic MFF BBW depravity." (Unless, of course, your wife *was* Jann Arden, in which case your neighbor would be, say, Mo'Nique.)
So there ya go, anything that is as good as that, is, to coin a phrase, a "Monarch's Dream". Therefore, Monarch Dream would be a great name for a spoiled, pretentious British pretty-boy alternative rock band. Here they come, taking the stage: "Hello, we're Monarch Dream. We are the greatest band in the world. Monarchs dream of being able to see us perform in person...yeah, two of us used to be in Oasis, what's your point?"
Anyhoo, back to my particular Monarch dream...
So it was mid-September, and the annual Monarch migration was underway, and, for whatever reason, in my dream they migrated in flocks. They would fly at night, and then rest as a flock in someone's yard or wherever, and spend the day feeding and sunning and saving up energy for the next night's flight.
And so I awoke one morning and went to the kitchen and looked out the window to discover that a flock of Monarchs had set up camp in my backyard for the day. I called off work. I didn't even lie and say I was sick. For this was a rare and privileged occurence. My supervisor, knowing of my fascination with the species, would understand.
My life-long love of Monarchs had come to its zenith on this day! I would spend the day observing my fair-winged friends. Except...well, there is one detail I haven't mentioned yet, and I would be horribly remiss if I didn't: these particular 'dream Monarchs' (also a good band name, and slightly less-pretentious) were...shall we say, (cue a bit of spooky reverb) NOT OF NORMAL SIZE.
Normal size of a Monarch being about a 4-inch wingspan, that is. Ah, but these Monarchs were...are you sitting down?...seven and a half times their normal size. That is to say, approximately a 30-inch wingspan. Thus when they were at rest with their wings folded up, they were about 15 inches tall. And as can be expected in, I think, most dreams, this seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. For reasons only my neurons will ever really know, this WAS normal Monarch size. In my dream.
[Forget "Sweet Transvestite", this is my next Halloween costume]
So there I am, sitting on my back porch, sipping from my 2-liter bottle of tea, having fixed no more complicated a breakfast for myself than a couple of pieces of German Rye toast, as I don't want to miss a minute of the wonderful show of nature in my yard: A few hundred or so huge, giant, and, in retrospect, almost downright frighteningly-gargantuan Monarch butterflies. (I also have a few cans of Chef Boyardee stacked up out there to get me through the day. Those new pull-tab lids are sooo convenient.)
I mean, now that I think about it in my waking existence, you normally would expect any such type of gigantic insects appearing in a dream to have claws and fangs and be flying around attacking and biting and killing people and beating them to death with their massive wings and feasting on their blood and flesh and people are running around screaming and panicking and CNN reporters are being trampled and some even offered up sacrificially and it all probably looks fantastic on a wide-screen HDTV and hey honey make some more popcorn willya please Spielberg has really outdone himself this time! (Okay, I just went all-out Mark Morford there with the run-on and all the 'and's and shit. My apologies if you hate that sort of thing. But how could you?)
[The pic I had *was* damn-near perfect. Mothra makes a passable replacement.]
But no, these were gentle, happy, playful, friendly giant Monarchs. (Hey, I just figured it out. Friendly giants! I use to love the "Friendly Giant" on the CBC as a kid. Ahh, warm, fuzzy memories...) And they would joyfully hop around the yard...well, only about a third to a half of them at a time, it seemed. Most of the rest were quietly napping in the trees, and a few were feeding on flowers here and there. (Maybe somewhere deep in the innermost parts of the canopies there was some mating going on, I imagined, but the rest were shielding anyone's view. Prudes. Maybe I like to watch? Come on, let me see some hot giant-butterfly sex. I mean, I've been sitting here half the day by now, I'm starting to get just a bit bored out here. Even I have my limits.)
[The late great Bob "The Friendly Giant" Homme]
Anyhoo, the rest were hopping around the yard all festive-like and making an almost-inaudible (and for the moment indistinguishable) sort of boinging sound, like a happy little flock of hyperactive orange-and-black-winged sheep on a giant yard-sized trampoline ("Shiny happy Monarchs hopping 'round..."), and it was just about that time some PBS nature-show host dude showed up and asked permission to film on my premises, to which I gladly obliged. I'm not sure, it may have been one of the Attenboroughs, don't ask me which one, Probably whichever one is still alive. Or maybe the dead one? I dunno. Whatever. It's not important.
[Caption: "This monarch butterfly is jumping on a trampoline. It planted a vine on a trellis."]
So he helpfully explains to me that although they are all roughly the same size, the ones resting in the trees are the adults and the ones hopping around on the ground are the youngsters. The very young are noticeably smaller, but are harder to spot since they are up in the trees with their parents.
Then he asks if I would like to know how to sex them? (I forget what my hilariously quick-witted response was, but if you know me well enough, you know it had to be side-splitting.) Well anyway, he then advises that if I listen carefully to their individual little quiet boinging sounds, that there are two distinct types: the males make a boinging sound that sounds sort of like the word 'port', while the female boing sounds sort of like the word 'point'.
This is the sort of thing you just don't notice under any circumstances until someone points ('point's?) it out to you, then you can't NOT notice it. You can't escape it. (Like when you see the same painting on a wall for years, and then one day you notice a dog's face in one of the clouds that you never noticed before, after which it's always the very first thing you see in the picture.) So now it's almost as if I am being deafened by all these softly quiet little 'port's and 'point's in my backyard. Can you imagine the sound? Can you imagine the sight! And the sound? Together? Whoa. These are some good drugs I'm on, man.
[Clearly this is not the painting I meant.]
He also 'point's (sorry, I can't help it) out that the females' hop averages out to be, for all practical purposes, exactly twice as high as the males'. This is indeed apparent. This is the kind of astuteness we have all, I think, come to expect from our PBS nature-show hosts. But what I learned next really surprised me.
In a jive-ass attempt to make myself seem like a know-it-all, I mention a casual observation I have just...well, observed: Some of the youngsters were play-chasing each other around the perimeter of the yard, and I noticed that the males' hop seemed to average out to be, for all practical purposes, exactly twice the distance of the females'. This was not readily noticeable on one's initial observation of the majority of a flock of giant Monarchs hopping around your yard en masse like a sort of lepidopteral Woodstock. An insect rave. A Monarch mosh pit!
I also observed a distinct difference in the frequency of hops between them. My ear just happened to pick out, at one particular moment, one of each gender hopping near me, and oddly enough, for every hop the female made, the male made two hops. And though they weren't actually interacting in any observable way, from my vantage point they seemed to have a rhythm going with each other. As luck would have it, they were perfectly synched. I'm not sure if I can approximate it here in text, but I'll try. The two sounds side by side were sort of like this:
"Portportportportportportportport..."
"Point.....point.....point.....point....."
...which, when observed, called to mind for me an old Pepe LePew cartoon, where he's steadily hopping along in pursuit of the cat. Only here the genders were reversed. And the two I heard weren't actually chasing each other, but the sound was definitely there.
Thus, the difference in hop frequency plus the difference in hop distance meant that the males traveled 4 times as fast as the females. (I think this ratio may also apply, in reverse of course, to the Pepe LePew cartoons.) And shockingly, the host dude had never noticed any of this. Apparently, no one else had ever noticed it either. I was the first! Where then, I thought, were my PBS dollars going? None of these jackoffs ever noticed something so seemingly obvious? "What the fuck are they paying you idiots for?!" I almost screamed.
"You're kidding," I actually said.
Later in the day, after the 'port'ing and 'point'ing had mostly died down and the camera crew had left, I spotted one of the smaller Monarchs that had just fallen out of the tree near the back corner of the yard. It had landed on its back with its wings spread out, and it was stuck there like a turtle, kicking its legs in the air. I hurried out and righted it.
It was a bit shaken so I petted it and comforted it, "There you go, little one, you're okay now," and it was obviously very grateful and started purring like a cat and sort of rubbing against my leg. "Careful," I cautioned, "you don't want to rub your scales off." I petted it some more and scritched its chin (it wasn't old enough to hop around yet, so I don't know what gender it was). Then I carefully picked it up and put it back up in the tree with its parents, who also seemed grateful.
Finally, around sunset, the flock gradually took off, a few at a time, and among the last to take off were the little one I helped and its parents. Just before they took flight, the parents looked back at me and seemed to nod in gratitude for my help and hospitality. My heart was warmed.
Then, the little one, before taking off behind them, looked back and, with just the very tip of one of its wings, waved to me as if to say "Thank you for letting us stay in your yard for the day! Bye-bye!" It was almost like some sappy-ass Disney movie or something. All that was missing was some lame Elton John ballad. And much as I hate to admit it, I got a little misty-eyed. But it WAS quite a touching moment.
[So I search for Elton John photos and I find this gem. Caption: "If Elton John was a poodle..."]
"Bye, little one," I waved back. "Maybe I'll get to host your descendants next year!"
[Noel says: "'Monarch waving' brought up the following:"]
So I'll bet you're wondering just what the fuck I had for dinner the night I had this dream. I'm not sure, but I believe it was leftover Long John Silver's fish (shaped like Nevada) re-fried in bacon grease. There you go. Good luck inducing your own giant Monarch dreams, if you dare! (And be sure not to miss the excellent footage of giant butterflies hopping around in my backyard, coming soon to PBS. Check local listings.)
[You might want to stock up on antacids]
[Left pic is a replacement]
I am not a normal man.
[Noel says: "No, you're not."]
