ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (07-24-25)
Is it my imagination or are bugs this summer buggier than usual? They seem more aggressive, better organized and better equipped. My skills as a catcher of bugs are constantly being tested. They consist of taking a swipe at the air, quickly closing my fist with a smug look on my face, and then slowly opening it, waiting for my wife to ask, "Did you get it?" before saying, "Of course," and pretending to wipe it off my hand and into the garbage.
I may need to seek professional help from an exterminator: "I found a new type of spider in my garage, perhaps you can identify it." "Can you describe it?" "Yes. It's smallish, but still fits two cars, if you don't mind getting in through the window." "The spider, not the garage." "Oh. Well, it had a beard, it was about yay-big, although the word 'yay' gives the impression that I was happy to see it; it had large eyes, long legs, a roman nose, and was probably a male, because it did not shave its legs, although it could have been a lazy or bohemian female." "Okay, what I'm getting from you is that it looked somewhat like Javier Bardem, assuming that Javier Bardem does not shave his legs." "Yes. That's exactly right. Do you think it's poisonous?" "Why, did you eat it?"
Which reminds me- my cat, who is about a athletic as tree fungus, caught a moth the other day. This was surprising enough, but it's possible that the moth simply flew into its paw by mistake and was temporarily knocked unconscious. Then the cat looked at me with distaste, as if I should keep a cleaner house with less bugs in it, and what am I going to do with it. I told the cat, if you catch it, you eat it. In the wild this would be your FOOD. It's not a catch-and-release program. Anyway the spider in the garage was pretty toned, like it maybe had its own personal trainer. I told my wife to hand me my shoes. "Don't you need just one shoe to kill it?" "Yes, but I need both shoes to run away long before that happens."
I have other questions the exterminator might help me with, like, "How do I keep no-see-ums away?" "Well, are you sure they were no-see-ums? What did they look like?" "I have no idea, I didn't see-um." "Well did one bite you, or sting you?" "I'm not sure which end it was usin
, and by the time I put on two pairs of glasses, it was just standing there holding a knife and fork."
I was talking to somebody that had ants in their home, as we do. She said that the worker ant takes the bait from the ant trap to the queen, and that destroys the whole colony. Can you imagine if YOU'RE the poor idiot who brought a lump of poison to the QUEEN? "Look at this, Your Highness, I think it's a piece of a Butterfinger, and I didn't eat any of it, I brought it straight to YOU. I ask for nothing in return, I'm just a poor ant, and I am not worthy. A cost of living increase would be nice." She eats it and drops dead, and all of a sudden everybody's looking at you, either with disdain or respec
, depending on what they thought of the Queen. By the way there's a similar strategy in chess.
I read somewhere that you can spread coffee grounds around the perimeter of your house, and it messes up the scent of their trail and they can't use it again. It does seem to work, but what if the ants come in all amped up on caffeine, and chatting up a storm, talking about how boring picnics can be, and how great it is to have a thorax, and how grains of sand weigh much more than you'd think especially when wet, and you're just trying to find a graceful way to end the conversation?
A mosquito bit me on the face the other day. I watch a lot of true crime shows on television, and the very nature of the assault told me that it was personal, not a crime of greed or opportunity, but a crime of passion. Clearly this bug had an obsession with me, or mistakenly thought we were in a relationship. What even caused our breakup? Was it that I hate to fly? Was it that I sometimes read a newspaper, and rolling it up seemed like a passive-aggressive act? Who can remember, I've moved on since then. Maybe we were better off as friends.
If we should ever run out of domestic bugs, there are always new bugs that someone unwittingly brought in from some faraway land. The spotted lanternfly arrived can decimate important crops by sucking their sap. The emerald ash borer likely arrived in a shipment of wood. Its behavior, while boring, can get right into your ash, and after that you're on your own. These invasive species often taste AWFUL, so there are no known predators to keep them in check. The only way they can be controlled is by turning their destructive behavior into self-destructive behavior. Encourage drinking, dating the wrong kind of boyfriends and gambling. I have another good idea: Introduce invasive bugs from Asia to invasive plants from Asia, and let them figure it out.
I guess we should be lucky that the animals that bite us so often are usually the smallest ones. If you went out to do some gardening and you came back inside to complain, "Ugh, the lions out there are AWFUL today," it would be a lot worse.
