Wednesday, May 13, 2015

"No Shell Over Here, Baby. It Just Slows Me Down." ~ Mub the Slug

When the kids and I saw the movie Epic two summers back, we immediately developed an affection for Mub the Slug. Mub may have been covered in a thin layer of slippery slime, but he made up for that disgusting flaw with his sweet, laid-back personality. I may have even called him "adorable" once or twice.

And that's the problem here. Cartoons depict animals like slugs (and others - Charlotte the Spider, for example) as cute and cuddly, when in real life they look positively grotesque. I tried to envision the lizard in Hallie's dollhouse as an animated version of himself so that instead of trapping him in a cage of books, I could have just picked him up and put him outside. I tried to pretend the spider crawling across my kitchen floor was Charlotte so that instead of throwing my shoe at her I could have simply returned her to her babies. It didn't work.

On a typical day I don't give much thought to slugs. The kids and I see the occasional small, black slug on the sidewalk - and then laugh about how it's a good thing slugs don't have shells because shells would really slow them down - as we walk to school, but that's the extent of it.

Then one morning I headed out into the garage and found Will dry heaving behind my car. When I asked him what ailed him, he just pointed at the ground.
I'm dry heaving now.
I left real life Mub the Slug s…l…o…w…l…y inching his way across the floor of the garage to walk the kids to school. When I returned home he still hadn't made it out from behind my car, so I "swept" him out of the garage and into the yard as he oozed excess slime in protest.

I am DONE with critters, thank you very much. Give the slugs to some other state and leave us Texans be with our snakes and lizards and scorpions.

Note: do NOT use google images to search for pictures of Mub the Slug. Because one minute you'll be scrolling through pictures of cute little buddies and then the next minute - BAM - you're suddenly looking at the grossest creations on this earth. I learned this the hard way...

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