Green energy and our climax of critters

The kids spied the lopsided interloper on the ceiling a couple of days ago amid the dwindling barometric fizz after the storm that dumped two inches on us in 20 minutes. It was all quite biblical until, suddenly, it wasn't.

Fittingly, I was in the middle of Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams when the rain and hail overwhelmed all those gutters and sent a river down the backyard.

Reich's 1973 memoir about his gifted yet maligned scientist father, Wilhelm, famously inspired Kate Bush's hit Cloudbusting from her 1985 album Hounds of Love and, a little less famously, Patti Smith's Birdland, from her 1975 debut, Horses.

Well before George Lucas went mainstream with the idea of an omnipresent "force", counter-culture darling Wilhelm Reich claimed to have discovered a benevolent biological energy called "orgone" (a portmanteau of "orgasm" and "ozone"), which could be harnessed and amplified via "accumulators", climax isolation tanks to be parodied years later in Woody Allen's Sleeper ("Ogasmatron") and Roger Vadim's Barbarella ("Excessive Machine").

The radical Austrian doctor who fled fascism all the way to the United States, also invented alleged weather-controlling "cloudbusters", multi-barrelled atmospheric weapons of a type Ming the Merciless would be proud.

If the rainmakers and feel-good phone booths weren't enough of a red flag, Reich also believed UFOs regularly visited Earth, emitting bad energy all over the shop.

Reich's exciting and completely above-board research was going just swimmingly on his Maine property, Orgonon, until the authorities decided enough was enough and arrested the psoriasis-afflicted psychoanalyst, driving him away from his loving, confused boy in baleful, black cars, just as they did to Donald Sutherland in the film clip to Bush's song, which I still remember watching on Countdown (that wig the only blot on her otherwise pristine record).

Wilhelm died aged 60 in 1957 from heart failure in a Pennsylvania jail.

Kate Bush ... Patti Smith ... Woody Allen ... scientific communes ... universal energy ... orgasms ... it all feels so very '70s, as does this Harlemesque huntsman who's caught my eye in a corner of the lounge room floor as I finish up Reich Jr's tribute to his brave/brilliant/bonkers dad.

The effortlessly cool Huggy Bear-cum-John Shaft creature - lean and sinewy and brown and rangy - stretches his remaining shagpile limbs out across the carpet in the hush of a family home struck dead by the ineffable exhaustion of school holidays at halfway point.

I'm beginning to nod off myself when the huntsman, sensing movement, crouches against one of our oversized, outdated skirting boards which, should you ever require a replica, are not stocked by Bunnings, Mitre 10, Magnet Mart or even Masters when it was alive (no doubt having folded because of its arrogant skirting board policy). I realise the critter has the crumpled, desiccated quality of a pilgrim in need of a drink, so I fetch a shallow plastic dish from the kitchen, fill it with a non-threatening film of water and place it before our plucky visitor.

The big spider, like a big dog, laps it up. I switch off the lamp and leave him to it.

More B. R. Doherty

Had he lived long enough to witness the irony of our antisocial age of social media, I imagine the radiation-wrangling, alien-busting, free-loving Wilhelm Reich would've been one expert advocating we 21st century humans should "look up" more often.

Some days, it can feel as though we've gone from dawn to dusk without having unhunched our shoulders and lifted our troubled gaze from those important devices.

It's a pity because so much truly excellent stuff is up there; the sun, the moon, the stars, stop signs ...

Obviously, too much looking down makes us feel bad because doomscrolling is a known cause of orgone depletion but it also goes against an evolutionary imperative which dictates looking up equals survival.

Had Australopithecus had access to the handheld internet, not only would there have been even more masturbation across the savannah, he would've been eaten out of history long before earning on a spot on the extended family tree.

Like any supposedly sane person, I feel wretched upon realising I've barely looked beyond the laptop all day and, normally, I'd support any call for us to raise our chins and ocular standards, but, this summer, it's been the minuscule world at my feet which has captured my imagination, so, if anything, I'd actually suggest we should be looking down a bit more.

The bugs are off the charts.

From our thirsty home-invading huntsman to horse-sized horse flies to wolf-sized wolf spiders to dragon-sized, well, you get the drift, entomologically (and, unfortunately, epidemiologically) speaking 2020/21 is a special moment in time.

To stroll our lush east coast neighbourhoods is to enter a world of elegant venation and crude proboscidation. We're up to our torsos in tagmata and face a daily shellacking of shellac.

Looking down, in the dirt, in the grass, I'm finding things I've never seen before, feeling an urge to pinboard every fascinating specimen that crosses my path, hoping to join the ranks of that kid who rediscovered a rare beetle at Lake Burley Griffin the other day or that scientist who got to name a fly after Beyoncé because it has a big, golden bum.

There's a sadness to all this, too, because this fecundity, this rain, can't last. Soon enough, the dry will return, these awesome incy wincies will be gone and we'll be left wondering if this verdant snapshot wasn't all a dream, like how Peter Reich grapples with the fantastic memories of his strange, cherished childhood with his oddball father.

But I suppose that's just the pessimist in me and, in general, I should enjoy the here and now, maybe even look up a bit more, as my wife does.

The other day, peering into the cerulean void from a yoga mat on the lawn, she watched the wind catch a silken sail and propel three intrepid spiderlings into the great unknown.

Naturally, Charlotte's Web comes to mind (We take to the breeze, we go as we please) and as anything from mad scientists to amputee arachnids prompt us to contemplate existence, it's always worth remembering E.B. White's message of seasonal renewal; how we're all part of a binding, recycling cosmic energy, a force, if you will.

It's a comforting thought.

I just wish I had one of those cloudbusters in the shed.