(All we have to feral is feral itself)
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I’ve subscribed to a darkly sinister conspiracy theory. I believe there’s a handful of zealous, evil realtors out there who hire snakes. You know, as relocation motivators.

And they’ve sent me another one.

If you’re one of the three people outside of my immediate family who read my weekly humor columns, you know by now of my “issues” with snakes. I despise them more than any creature on Earth that’s not running for office. If some woman somehow convinced me to stand on a Grand Canyon precipice to take a selfie, and a snake showed up between me and escape, I would just jump, unless I could manage to distract the reptile by throwing the woman at it.

Once, years ago, I remember getting caught off guard by some criminally-negligent TV promo for a new “out in the wild” series. Suddenly, the sadistic director-person/camera-person hit us with a tight one-shot of a rattlesnake striking the camera.

I had to call in sick. For three days.

There’s lots more to my pathology, but let’s get you caught up. About a week ago, I drove home from work, pulled into my garage, keyed off the vehicle, and let rise my daily prayer of thanks for allowing me survive another day of Upstate South Carolina traffic, which is a lot like the April 1975 evacuation of Saigon, but with less turn signals.

Next to the single step leading into my kitchen, there’s a little white bait trap, one of several tactically positioned around my home by the company who handles pest control and deep wallet extractions. But on that day, there was some doomed something, stuck inside the trap, that was way larger than your average ant, unless I had mutant ants visiting on a provisional visa from Chernobyl, or Baltimore.

You know what it was. Of course it was. It was, as Marlon Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom might put it, a feral relocation motivator.

For those of you old enough to remember the Dark Ages, when it actually took ten years to watch ten seasons of Friends, American families (look it up) used to spend an evening in the same room (look it up) watching Marlon Perkins host a wildlife show that almost never featured primates discarding syringes in major West Coast cities. The show was hosted by Marlon Perkins, a man who looked like the illegitimate love child of a mating between Walt Disney and Mr. Rogers.

Marlon would kick off each episode, apparently seated in the dim paneled den of some recently repossessed manufactured home, by introducing the television audience to tonight’s allegedly interesting life-form that, oddly, always seemed to be the “natural enemy of the trap-door spider.” Inevitably, later in the show, Marlon would then send his bruised stooge Jim Fowler out to soul-kiss the feral specimen, while Marlon lingered in the studio to discuss life insurance, possibly for the benefit of the Fowler family.

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Marlon: Tonight, we’ll study the common Garage Intruder snake (Carportus Satanus reptilius), a harmless serpent that everyone agrees has great value to the ecosystem, except for one guy in South Carolina named Barry. The garage snake is the natural enemy of the trap-door spider. And now, our intrepid Jim Fowler will attempt to withdraw venom through the creature’s nether region, while I wait in the van.

Jim: Marlon, why don’t you go spit.

Marlon: I’ve got two words for you, Jimbo: “mortgage payment.”
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I don’t remember how early I developed my snake phobia. As a lifelong Baptist, there certainly might’ve been some “snake in the garden” nudge, though I was nearly six hours old before my parents insisted I attend Vacation Bible School. (In fact, I remember reading in the Old Testament the part where Moses insisted that single guys shouldn’t have sex, which was the day I knew I wasn’t going to be Jewish.)

The upshot is that a tiny snake had crawled into my closed-door garage, crossed the concrete, and Jeffrey Epstein-ed itself in my bait trap. After only 29 postings on Angie’s List, I found a bold warrior willing to remove the bait trap. But then a (former) friend pointed out that where there’s a baby snake, there’s a mom snake, except in major West Coast Cities.

Great. Now I need not only a new house, but new friends.