Bugs

As I wrote in yesterday's post, I had a delightful evening the other night at my nephew's birthday party. Around the dinner table, we engaged in a pastime that I'm sure is becoming pretty universal at family and friend gatherings: relating funny videos we've seen on youtube. I've been wondering lately why there don't seem to be as many jokes going around, and I'm thinking maybe the Internet, especially youtube, has something to do with it. Why go through the effort of making up jokes and passing them around, when a good chuckle can be had searching sites like youtube? I especially like the clipped language that goes along with it all. "How you I find that video?" "I don't know, just type in 'hamster in model hair.'" Anyway, my nephews, great teens as they are, tipped me off to this one:



Now that's pretty funny on a few different levels. But it got me thinking about bugs, and my history with them. One of my earliest memories is kneeling down on my bed to say my goodnight prayers and kneeling smack dab on a wasp. A wasp sting on a kneecap is not a pleasant experience for a four-year-old. I don't know what it says about my lifelong relationship with prayer, but I know for sure that ever since then, I've hated any kind of creepy crawly thing. Swallowing bugs is awful (see below for Marlon Brando handling the situation with a little more aplomb than the TV reporter; I've been having trouble getting these videos to appear here, so to see it go here), but in some ways getting a mosquito in your eye is worse, I believe. The swallowing is way grosser, but it's kind of over rather quickly. Getting a bug out of your eye seems to take forever. And long gone are the days when you'd count your mosquito bites with pride.

Luckily I haven't had much bad luck with spiders in my life, but I do remember one, I think it was a spider, who freaked the hell out of me. I was living down South at the time, and obviously not accustomed to the ways of the creepies down there. I saw a spider on the floor and immediately and with not too much worry moved to step on him. Well, just as I raised my foot, the thing leaped up (much too quickly and forcefully to have been on a web) to at least the height of my face. A minute later, after peeling myself off the far wall and assuring the neighbors that my shriek did not mean I was possessed by the devil (this was below Mason/Dixon, remember), I could still see the leaping spider sitting on the floor, no doubt laughing his little ass off, I'm sure, if I had dared to get close enough to look at his face. I grabbed my trusty hardback Webster's (a good hardback Thesaurus might have been more appropriate, but alas, Fellhower [you'll meet him in the poem below] burned my Thesaurus one in night in college when I wasn't there; I still have never gotten the full story). With dictionary in hand, I crept slowly across the room to the vicinity of the helicopteringable spider. When I got close enough, and now worrying if the thing could jump vertically, diagonally too, I launched the hefty tome not at the spider but above him (mama didn't raise no dummy). Sure enough, as the spider caught wind of something coming at him, he jumped straight up again. Unfortunately for him, the gravity-obeying book met him halfway and gave him a rather swift elevator ride back down to his hardwood doom.

Enough. I'm getting itchier than hell here. After the jump, though, if you're really brave, you can read a very old, nasty poem I wrote about cockroaches and college.

Bono: "Am I bugging you? I didn't mean to bug you."



Respect The Bastards

Let me start by making this clear:
I'm no insectaphile
But goddamn
Cockroaches have balls.
One just crawled over my leg
And across my futon
In the middle of Jane Austen.
What balls!
I almost didn't kill him
I admired him so much.

A college friend of mine
Had a dead roach removed
From inside his right ear once
When he was a kid,
And one time he trapped one on a table top:
The roach took a quick glance back behind him
To check his fate and then leaped off the table
And made for the wall.
Three foot drop.
With balls like that
They'll bury us.

In college we had them all over the house:
Toilet seats, TV sets, and in sealed tight
Noodle bags in our pantry.
Our roach motel was so popular
Even a mouse checked in
And never checked out.

Cleaning out our kitchen at the end of summer
We sprayed dozens of 'em running from the spice rack.
We just crippled 'em, though,
And allowed Fellhower from Perrysburg
To drop ammonia on 'em.
He got into stuff like that.
A few drops will do 'em.
It took a whole pail of the stuff once
For him to drown a big rat out back.

Anyway, as we're strafing the roaches,
Prepping for Fellhower's napalming,
We see two of 'em caught in the love act,
Roach style.
Unfortunately the supposedly weaker sexed one
Succumbed to the spray,
And like most males,
The roach on the top was stuck—literally.
We watched as he struggled but couldn't get out.
Five of us, undergraduates.
We agreed, THAT was the way to go.
And then Fellhower 'mmonia'd'm.

Bug Man, we called him,
The strange guy who came and sprayed
His own white powder concoction
All around the house for two days every six months.
Bug Man would powder two rooms,
Smoke bongs with a couple of brothers in Room Three for an hour
And talk Star Trek,
Then go do two more rooms.
Bug Man liked killing bugs at our house.
His powder was roacho-cidal.
Two weeks later one or two anorexic albinoed roaches
Would stumble out of a crack
As if to give us the finger
Before dying valiantly.
I almost felt sorry for one of 'em once.
We'd see no more roaches for months.
Bug Man kicked ass bi-annually.

I tell you,
If roaches were man-sized,
I'd be embarrassed to shower with 'em.
They've got balls I cannot touch.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band-Ant Man Bee