If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to see it... it'll probably hit a facehugger

And since I’ve started up by torturing your unsuspecting minds with mushrooms, that is how I’ll continue, because I just can’t be arsed to be more brilliant than that. And this won’t even be a rule-post, but simply one of those filler post in which I am going to try my hardest to convince everyone that I should be heavily medicated. So have a random tale of what happened to me while I was picking mushrooms.

None of these mushrooms were actually picked, because they’re either inedible or poisonous (or in the case of the third one, edible, but very prone to picking up heavy metals out of the ground and delivering them to your liver). I just took photos of them, looking an absolute tit while I was lying on my stomach in the middle of the forest, muttering things like “Sexy, sexy, yes, give me some pouting – ooooh, I like it!” because I’m weird like that.

Anyway, there I am, peacefully picking mushrooms in between the photo sessions – and being slightly overwhelmed because there’s honestly a bit TOO MANY of them for my short attention-span to cope with all at once, and therefore mostly just staring at them and panicking because I don’t know which one to pick first – when all at once some small part of my consciousness screams “FACEHUGGER!”

I react immediately by stumbling skill- and gracefully away from where my brain is telling me that a small, evil monster is waiting to impregnate me with a bigger monster, emitting a sound like “HERUGH!”, which is probably the mating call of a female moose, as if I needed a horny moose to make my facehugger-problem worse. Only, once my brain starts registering what it is actually SEEING, I realize that no, it’s not a facehugger. It’s just a toad. The biggest motherfucking toad I’ve ever seen. I don’t know whether to be relieved and then revolted, or if I should just move straight to revolted.

Now, let me explain. I am usually not scared by the crawly, creeping and/or scaly part of the animal kingdom. Snakes don’t scare me much. I mean, if one would suddenly appear out of nowhere next to me, I would probably jump away from it, but that’s just healthy not-wanting-to-be-bitten behavior. But if one were to turn up in my garden – and they have, numerous times – I wouldn’t freak out. I wouldn’t go anywhere near it, because that’s dumb, but I wouldn’t freak out just because of it being there. No. I would calmly ask my father to kill the shit out of it.

Ahem.

The point is…. the point is not snakes, but rather that I am not usually the one who’ll jump and scream at the sight of small animals of different descriptions. Rats? Rats are cute. Spiders? I love spiders, although I draw a line at having them in my face while I sleep. Other big bugs? I’m perfectly fine with them, although a strange and unusual childhood has taught me that having grasshoppers under your shirt is an unpleasant experience (and that they won’t understand that you want to keep them as pets and that you’re only trying to hide them from your mother, who would step on them). Frogs? Cute. Lizards? Awesomely cool.

Having something as big as your father’s foot suddenly move in your recent vicinity when you are really not prepared for it? Not cool. REALLY not cool.

Once I had recovered from the shock of a toad too large and fat to even jump properly, I started to relax and feel pretty sorry for the poor animal, because it was obviously deadly afraid of me, trying to burrow through the moss. In fact, I even started to think that it was cute. I don’t know what kind of person you are if you start to think that things are cute only the moment that you find that they are cowering in fear in front of you, but I’ll chalk it up to the barbarian in me.

At that moment, someone behind me said, “Hello?” and I almost leapt into the air again, before realizing that my moose impersonation had probably alerted a fellow mushroom picker that I was there, and she was probably just trying to find out if I was some kind of mad person, running around and screaming wildly at the seemingly empty forest as I was.

So I said, “Uh, hi. Sorry for screaming, but I just thought I saw a mutant. Turns out it was just a toad.”

And then I broke down in hysterical giggles as I realized what I’d just said, and the middle-aged woman I was talking to gave me a really skeptical look. But I didn’t much care, because even if I was speaking Swedish, and the connection there isn’t really that obvious, if she was any fun at all, this is still what she ought to have imagined me seeing.