It can be discouraging attempting to establish control over your domestic environment in order to improve the situation.
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So often problems encountered are created by those trying to fix them.
And with help like that, who needs harm.
But you soldier on.
Consider an ant colony taking refuge in your pantry during damp humid days.
Why would these pesky varmints do that?
To live, to nest, to cause domestic discontent at a species level?
Such a hassle to clean out the pantry and possibly re-line it, seeing someone left the lid off the honey and it dripped.
Not to mention the genocide that will have to be waged with the ant rid.
Overkill perhaps? That'll be the plan.
But doesn't it just illustrate humanity's capacity to stuff things up and then blame the victim?
Consider the dead oregano in your vegie patch. Victim of an attempt to spray nearby weeds that breezy afternoon.
Instructions warned about collateral damage. But collateral damage seems so naturally the outcome when you're trying to improve things. Usually unnaturally, or at least unintentionally.
Aiming low in terms of spray trajectory, but also positive outcomes. The answer was blown in the wind, and onto the oregano.
Now the oregano's dead because you attempted to help it live, and the weeds are thriving.
If only we could flavour food with bindii.
Maybe spray round the pantry next time and hopefully take down the ants.
It's an inexact science establishing domestic hegemony and it can be lethal for bystanders.
We were remembering our fishy the other day, in this sad, lamentable way.
Dear, dear Poisson - French for "fish".
A bit like naming your cat, Cat, minus the outrageous French accent.
Unnervingly indicative, too, of the way Poisson was to meet its maker, if you focus on the spelling.
And really, we were only trying to make things better by getting rid of flies.
For two years Poisson tread water atop our mantle-piece, staring out from its fish bowl, while we stared in from ours.
Hopefully not forlornly, although such is the station of stationary beings.
I wonder to this day if the love we felt was reciprocated by our fish in anything more than a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.
Probs not after we sprayed the room with insect repellent that fatal day.
And when I say 'fatal" I meant fateful, but homicidal is how it unfolded for Poisson.
Found floating, morte, on the surface when we got home.
Another victim or humanity's urge to better their environment only to poisson the situation.
Oh well, in typical human fashion you give yourself a spray of a different kind, and unlike Poisson, or the oregano and maybe the ants, you get back up and go again.
Hopefully we'll establish more constructive control next time.
