Sunday, June 1, 2008
Terror and Doom
What terrible horror lurks outside my night window, banging and poking and slamming and scratching against the window screen. What hideous demon flutters and scrapes and rattles out there, trying in vain to get through the window screen to claw out my eyes and gnaw on my skin and drink my blood while I would writhe and scream in unbearable pain. Listen! There are many of them at every window. They keep up their unceasing beating and tearing at the screen; they never stop trying to get in. Don’t go out there after dark and certainly not alone. It surely isn’t safe to be out there among them. It is June and the June bugs are here! Aaaaiiiieeeeee!
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6 comments:
Disgusting little things, aren't they?
Makes the grubs that they begin life as almost cute in comparison. But what do you mean, 'little'? The ones out there last night were surely about 3 feet long . . .
Are we stretching the truth just a little bit?!
June bugs and light. I was always amazed at how those little things were lit up (yes, I also squashed them on the concrete and watched their whole essence fade, I could be a normally cruel kid). I miss them. I have memories of suburban Chicago: my mother sitting in a folding aluminum chair, talking to the neighbors on the other side of their crappy fence. It would be mid-July and the Good Humor truck had just gone by and the dark would be settling in. That's when we could see them blinking. I would catch them and imprison them in mason jars. But I would let them go because their appearance signaled that it was time to go inside. Are we thinking about the same thing? June bugs are "lightening bugs", aren't they?
To me, they were pretty much the same source of light that you mentioned earlier, not a dying star a million light years away, but right in the palm of my hand. I'm in a sappy mood right now. Sorry.
no, dan, you are talking about the wondrous magical marvelous lightning bugs which are slender little beetles with glowing butts that fly gently and gracefully around the yard, staying back there where they belong, stopping to blink . . . blink . . . blink . . . and minding their own sweet business.
i am talking about giant pale brown huge fat juicy icky horrid giant almost ROUND beetles with giant pale brown wings that bong against the screen trying to get at me (or maybe just the light) and they bonk and bonk and bonk and blunder against the screen over and over and over and are annoying and irritating and HUGE and in the morning one or two might be stunned laying on the sidewalk outside the back door screen for you to accidentally step on and then they pop and squish and ooze about a gallon of their disgusting innards. I TRIED to get a family member to wait outside to trap one so I could take a photo to illustreate the post, but no, they are just as terrified and disgusted by them as i and fled indoors well before dusk.
Seriously, lightning bugs are maybe longer and narrower than a little fingernail and June bugs are the size of a thumbnail and as thick as they are wide - ick, ick, ick!!!!
There is a "dark" side to lightning bugs too. I understand that some of them can mimic the light pattern of other species of lighning bug in order to lure them in for a "good time" only to kill and eat them.
And let's not forget the glow worm (1 word?) which crawl on the ground and light up the ground with faint specs of light.
The bug world is a hostile place. I'm glad I'm human.
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