This strange attraction.

  
  Like everyone else, these past few years have seen me acting increasingly wierded out about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis - or as we all love to call it, the zombie fungus. We've pored over the pictures of ants and spiders after this insidious little sweetheart has wended its way through the viscera and nervous system of its unfortunate host. We've all made the right eeeurgh-type sounds and had those little alarm bells going off all over our limbic systems and corpus callosums, sending a macabre frisson to every fiber of our beings.

  And I suspect that for the first time we are starting to appreciate God and how and why he died.  By dint of necessity, we forcibly ripped the veil of anthropomorphism away from our collective face and gingerly placed what was left under the microscope.  Us humans get the toxoplasmosis gondii from our pet cats and everything else down the pyramid gets entomopathogens such as ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  It reminds me of Julian Barrett's performance in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (see link below).  It's just so absurd to me that we have the posturing of autarchs and demagogues around the world destroying by seemingly fair means or foul all the good that democracy has brought us and I, like most others, appear only to be able to sit around gnashing my teeth and renting my garments.

  But the real threat is not the Scylla of the flag wavers and the fascists, the patriots and jingoists, the zealots and the firebrands, the tinpot would-be world leaders such as Trump and Putin and Kim Jong Un and Netanyahu and May and Assad and Maduro and... The well seems bottomless at the moment, doesn't it?  No. The threat that increasingly gets me thinking, is the Charybdis of Ophy and its entomo family. And lover, I ain't talkin' about what awaits us in the winter years when our infirm bones cannae move so very fast.  

  I'm talking about my personal morbid fear that perhaps we've already been compelled by these microscopic horrors since before we climbed out of the slimy pond. Perhaps, in my whimsical musings, we'll one day discover the answer to the eternal accusation, "Why do you always have to act like a...?!".  For many, a shocking epiphany that we are of the world, not on it. 

  I'm going to start intravenous infusions of spirulina and filtered warm water immediately because I, for one, do not relish the prospect of our fungal overlord invasion, in order to get my symbiotic thrills.


  In any case, I bet you won't look at mushrooms quite the same way anymore.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways...