Monday, June 13th 2022.
Time to cry. Time to open your wallets and help.
***
Good morning. It’s about 6:30 and I am getting tired of the mosquitoes.
For the last hour or so I have been online looking for some kind of bug zapper. Yesterday, my ex partner brought some kind of evil smelling bug repellent with her. She conveniently left it behind trying to be nice. After she was gone, I couldn’t help myself and I sprayed a bit on my hair and arms and legs. This stuff must be like mayonnaise to mosquitoes. It was the worst mosquito night I’ve ever had. Absolutely brutal.
I don’t remember the mosquitoes being this bad last year. In fact, last year during the summer I kind of felt as if there was some kind of magic to the house. I did have some flies as guests and even tried to make friends with them. I used the relationship as a matter of learning to control my temper. It didn’t always work and I ended up killing a few. But after that they only mocked me. It was like a Star wars thing. “If you strike me down,” one fly told me, “I will return even more powerful than you can ever imagine.”
I remember distinctly having a conversation with a bee. I don’t have any qualms with bees or any pollinator really. I don’t have any problem with any herbivores really. I mean how can you? But sometimes the bees come into my kitchen and go crazy banging against the glass trying to get out. It’s impossible to convince them or oust them gently and they just keep banging their head against the wall again and again and again.
One day, I lost my temper. I picked up the torch I used to start fires and just flamed about eight bees. Silenced the room. A moment of relief for me but also perhaps some guilt. I don’t like being violent. I don’t like being annoyed but I don’t like being violent. No good comes from this.
A few days later a bee flew through the window of my house when I was sitting on the couch and just sat in front of me hovering. I looked at him and he stared at me with great disappointment on his face.
“What was the purpose of those murders?” The bee asked me. I could probably say he asked me because we understand how Bee society runs. “I thought we had an arrangement. You do not bother us in our world and we did not bother you and yours. You have nothing for us to eat and so we leave you in peace. What was the reason for those eight murders?”
I understood that the bee, kind of like anybody in the state of Florida, had no genuine rights and would never find anyone to take his case for the crime. He could sting me if you wanted to but this would be suicide and truthfully he might not even get close enough to me to hurt me. All he could do was exactly what he was doing. He approached me with dignity and asked the question. It was a matter of principle.
I told him I felt bad about it. I told him that as much as I wanted to be better, I was a member of the human species and therefore I had emotional and violent reactions to many things.
The bee told me that humans were well known as the destroyers of the planet. He told me that all the animals feared humans and hated us more than any other thing on the planet. He told me that he understood what kind of insanity and wastefulness we lived under. He told us that the animals frowned upon our uselessness on the planet. We seem to have no genuine purpose under nature to live here and even bite the hand that feeds us in going against nature and polluting and destroying for no reason that any of the animals could understand. We don’t do it for love or for life. We don’t do it for survival and we seem to take pleasure in causing pain to others.
This was a very solid moment and I truly felt horrible for what I had done. I apologized deeply to the bee and told him I would try with all of my heart not to repeat such an action. I really did feel bad about it. I feel bad about losing my temper and I felt bad about the murders. Those bees were not doing anything to harm me really.
The bee thanked me and told me that he forgave me. That’s what’s a part of life and though it was an unfortunate end for his eight friends, perhaps they should have been wiser than to get stuck on my kitchen window. He thanked me for not using pesticides in my garden and allowing him and his kind to live freely. Not many humans provided such a nice habitat for his family and he appreciated all of the positives. And then he left.
A long time ago I meant an old expatriate who shared time between Poland and Colombia. He’s one of those people who found that fixed income like an American pension went a lot farther in certain places. He told me not to take offense at mosquitoes and flies. I shouldn’t take it personally. They were just looking for something to eat. You can’t blame things for wanting to eat.
I don’t think mosquitoes are as honorable as bees. Bees are herbivores. They are sugar freaks to be sure but they don’t really have any particular reason to bother me. I don’t eat sugar and I don’t have anything sweet lying around my house that they might want to get into. There is no particular reason for them to hang out in here. But these mosquitoes are out for blood. They’re hideous whining buzzing sound just tells me that there’s going to be a sting and an itch and an ache. You can’t relax and make friends with him. I am their food and I’m not enjoying my role one bit.
Spraying this chemical repellent was worthless. I don’t want there to be so many mosquitoes around me. I’m not taking any pleasure in the relationship and I don’t see any honorable conversations. They are just annoying parasites and I have more parasites than I care to already have in this world.
What I found online is that there are basically three types of bug Killers. There’s the chemical brand that makes an unpleasant smell similar to this shit I sprayed on myself last night. I will not go down this route anymore. There is a Sonic route which emits some kind of unpleasant pitch. I’m not sure I believe in that very much. And then there’s the zappers that draw the bugs towards a light and when they get too close, ba da bing and they are off to Glory and have an opportunity to bother Jesus himself.
What I’m wondering is how annoying the sound of mosquito death might be. I’m also hoping that there isn’t any sort of electric home coming from this. I enjoy natural sounds and I love the quiet. I could see myself making an exception with the snap crackle and pop of mosquitoes going to hell. Icarus flying too close to the Sun. Who knows, I might even find that a comforting sound. One less blood sucker for me.
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
That weather report by the way was a lie. According to the barometer, we were supposed to have four small reins over the past few days. They leave the reports as if we did but we never did. It just rains a lot less than normal readings would tell us. The weather bureau has not adjusted.
It was a pleasant two weeks at the end of May with all of that rain. It was a bit of a lazy time. Comfortable temperatures and no particular reason to go watering. I was little upset at not having finished my water system but if you’re going to get all the water you need, you can feel a little fat and stupid and not worry about it too much. Now we are getting into the serious bits of the summer. Everything after the solstice is serious. Everybody gets stolen from a little bit every day. Up here, it’s about 4 minutes less light. It’s like a tax from God. It’s watching a loved one leave you.
We are in a drought. There are reasons for this. This is not a natural occurrence. In my opinion, we are simply poisoning the atmosphere too much. We drive too much. We burn too much gasoline. We put too much shit in the air. It’s screwing with the clouds and the weather. And yet nothing stops the party. Even in Ukraine, all they’re planning on is all of the new business and New opportunities they’ll have when the war is finally over. And they are going to need oil for all of this new business, aren’t they?
Yeah, there is a flaw to being out here. It’s a very brutal place. They play this game where they attack you and hurt you as much as they can and then when they back off and you feel a sense of relief at not being tortured anymore, they creep in there and try to make use of these new warm Happy feelings. It’s pretty parasitic really. They learn this culturally. They hand it down from generation to generation. They used to be more polite but then that was before we became a Russian colony. Once the Russians came in, we settled into our current groove of brutality.
Yes, these mosquitoes are driving me crazy. I do not like blood suckers and I don’t like having them around me. I don’t like being annoyed when I try to sleep. I don’t like all of the energy I have to spend to keep them off of me. I have to put this on my things to do list.
Got you! I just killed one. Sorry brother, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Give my regards to Jesus.
***
It’s about 20 minutes to 3:00 and I just meant the stupidest insect I’ve ever met in my life. I suppose I should look up what these guys are called. They are maybe a centimeter in length, kind of fat and tank like, they fly but really badly. But the most important thing is that they are sort of a metallic green in color. Their shell is very reflective. Almost like that multicolor metallic paint that you can get for about 20 million dollars.
Cetonia aurata, called the rose chafer or the green rose chafer, is a beetle, 20 millimetres (3⁄4 in) long, that has a metallic structurally coloured green and a distinct V-shaped scutellum. The scutellum is the small V-shaped area between the wing cases; it may show several small, irregular, white lines and marks. The underside of the beetle has a coppery colour, and its upper side is sometimes bronze, copper, violet, blue/black, or grey.
It’s a pretty cool looking bug. Visually stunning with the very odd metallic camouflage. But my current opinion is that it might be the stupidest bug I’ve ever seen in my life because they are ridiculously clumsy.
I have a few of these things flying around. They are pollinators, sugar freaks, which is both positive and negative. I have often said that you can’t reason with alcoholics. Alcohol is sugar and even if you’re talking to attractive women who live on coffee and sugar, you get the identical problem. There is no possible way to be reasonable with them. My
This afternoon, I was sitting in my office trying to make sense of my life. I don’t know why I have to be so fortunate to have so many cruel people love me so much. And I was at an exceptionally difficult moment in my thought when suddenly Mr chafer flew right into my computer screen, bounced off and landed on his back. He stayed there kind of like a turtle who can’t get up. His little legs were grasping at straws and it looked like that might just be the end of him. Flaw in darwinistic nature. If he ends up on his back, it’s over.
Technically, I don’t know if it was a he or a she but you know, with modern feminist culture being what it is, if I tried to say it was a she or even an it, someone would be offended. I’ve already got the mosquitoes after me, I don’t need any more political problems.
I didn’t particularly feel like killing him because I don’t really particularly feel like killing anything. And I didn’t torture him but it was hard for me not to observe how clumsy he was and how difficult it was to get back up on his feet.
I got the idea that I wanted to help him. I looked around for a piece of paper that I might scoop him up and toss him out the window. Ironically enough, I don’t seem to have any paper lying on my office desk anymore. I wonder where all the paper went.
I found the envelope that the government authority sent me to pay my bill for my land inspection and opened it up to act as a scoop to get the bug off my desk. About the time I was ready to move, he had managed to get himself back on his feet. One thing about not only this bug but quite a few bugs who reside here with me is that they are not particularly frightened of me at all. I’m not naturally a size fetishist. Doesn’t bother me to be a million times bigger than this bug but it doesn’t seem to bother him any either. In fact, he not only didn’t fly away when I started inviting him to get on the paper, he seemed more interested in sort of pulling himself together and grooming himself. I guess he was embarrassed about banging into my computer screen and knocking himself half unconscious and ending up on his back.
Nevertheless, I coaxed the document under some of his feet and he begrudgingly took a few steps onto the paper. I noticed that he doesn’t have much sticky stuff on the end of his legs. Spider-Man this dude is not.
I got him on the paper finally and stood up to walk him over to the window and this is when he got angry and decided that he could do it himself. I understand the feeling. I can’t stand when people come up and treat me like an invalid. I am an independent person regardless of my age. I can do it myself. I admire this attitude and others and I admired it in my friend.
So off the paper he went into the sky with his serious buzzing sound heading directly for the window except he made contact with the closed part of the window and not the open part. Clang. And down he went again. I saw him lying on the armrest of my couch back on his back again, his legs flailing but a little bit slower than the last time. I think he was going for a self knockout. I mean, you might have a cool paint job but you can only smash yourself on the head so many times before your pollen gathering days are over. Like I said, he was probably a drunk. You have to observe those laws about flying drunk. You can injure somebody and especially yourself.
I opened up that side of the window and gave him a small flick to get him out into the garden. There are flowers just below this window in case he wanted something to eat or maybe he should just thrash around in the grass a little bit.
I have a couple of insect theories right now that I’m a bit worried about. I was thinking if I should attribute all of these mosquitoes I have to all of the construction I did in the garden this year. Last year, I got a lot of respect from the insects. Only a few flies bothered to come in with me and all the other insects we’re perfectly content to live out in the garden. In fact, at certain times of the day I could not even be bothered by these guys even if I sat right in the grass. I was starting to feel like I was blessed. My relation to grasshoppers even was legendary.
This year though I have taken a lot of land for myself and my ex partner and I are regularly out there killing plants that might otherwise grow to be food for a lot of these insects. Maybe they’ve lost respect for me and feel I am no better than a standard human being. Maybe their moratorium on bothering me directly correlated to my moratorium on messing with their habitat. If I’m going to cause them pain, they will give it right back to me.
But as far as this chafer beetle is concerned, I think maybe it’s even worse than that. His behavior is very similar to a guy who gets off work and drinks himself to death everyday. His actions for someone who has had a little bit too much pollen today. What is he so depressed about?
And then it occurred to me that with an exoskeleton as shiny as his is, maybe he’s really upset at having to live through even more of this drought. There’s not enough rain and the Sun is too harsh. He might be reflective, but maybe he’s baking inside his shell.
Climate is a funny thing. If we’re talking about nature, Mr Darwin taught us all how everything adapts. The problem is that all of the things that grow naturally in this region have been able to live here for hundreds or even thousands of years. Now however, within only a short period of time where we are forced by occupying colonizers to drive as many cars as we can and put as much pollution into the air and onto the land and into the water, we are now in the midst of a decade and a half long drought. The trees who thrived here in their natural environment are all drying out and the possibility of this place becoming California like with ripping forest fires tearing up our land is starting to seem like an absolute eventuality.
I just don’t speak chafer beetle so it was hard for me to understand him. Or maybe I do understand him but I didn’t understand him because he was too drunk or upset and was slurring his words. Or maybe he was actually trying to kill himself the pain of life too much to take and the inevitability of the death of perhaps his entire species because of unwarranted and unnecessary human activity too much for him to bear. Maybe he flew in specifically to do an act of harakiri just for the eyes of the noble Lord who lives in the house.
Strange, strange things are happening here on the farm. I wish I could be more jovial about it. I wish I could address most of this in a better mood. It’s hard for me to. It’s not even the mosquitoes or greedy relatives that make me this miserable. I’m just not very good at ignoring the truth.
***
It’s a quarter to 8:00 and I guess I’m about done. I feel a little strange talking about having conversations with insects. I’m not sure how people will perceive all of this. In a perfect world, no one will look at my body and we’ll just allow the words to be what they are. I can see perhaps that these words are moving or even thought-provoking. Perhaps someone takes what I was saying as somehow relating to respect for all living things. Perhaps they tied this in with empathy that the species never genuinely seems to have or perhaps simply a social satire written by a very tired ecology guy. I don’t believe this would happen but perhaps if I can imagine a good scenario, someone might buy into it and use it.
If I were to look to the Future and have the power to create anything I want with it, I would definitely create something clean and kind, a picture where many people I know are happy and together and easy and awake. A lot of these people are so crazy you couldn’t talk to them even with a suitcase full of money. There is literally nothing you could do to crack their insanity. But in my Utopia, they are at ease and untroubled. They are free to be who they are and they are accepting of others. They are the same people, just different. Nicer. Easier. More loving.
The problem is that no matter how many pictures I make, nobody wants to do anything but stare at my body. To them, I am an object, a thing, an idea and often something to be frightened of I’m sure. The only thing I never am are my words despite that these words are all that matter to me.
At the moment, I’m in the warm room and listening to a light drip of rain coming off the roof. It’s about 2 hours early for the scheduled rain. The wind has been blowing outrageously for an hour or so but only now are we having a few drops. I’d like to go out and see if my invention is working but there’s not really much of a point in it for a while. We’re going to need a bunch of rain, enough to put some serious leaders into the feed bucket before I know if all of my fittings work and all of the buckets are getting full. I have faith that my workmanship is reasonable despite arguments that perhaps we should have built these things with overflow valves instead of feeding at the bottom.
One thing I have learned is that I actually do need a different pump. The submersible pump that I have is just not going to be effective enough for me. I’m pleased with myself for having learned how to make it work at its optimum level but unfortunately, it just leaves too much water at the bottom of the buckets. No matter what I do, there will always be water left in the bottom of the tanks and that’s just not efficient enough for me.
It’s not a chronically expensive mistake. I didn’t pay very much for the pump I have. The one I will get is about twice as expensive but we’re really not talking about that much money. I’m not speaking with American bravado here, I’m just saying that if it’s important to do, it’s important to do right. I am just going to have to keep at this until everything works exactly as it’s supposed to.
The real rain is supposed to come at about 10:00 tonight. Unfortunately, this is after it’s dark. I’m a little worried about how fragile the downspout is. There’s nothing really holding it in place but gravity and I truly hope that if the wind starts kicking things around, it doesn’t just blow off the roof and take at least one section of pipe with it.
But let’s say everything is fine. Let’s say that it works and we have more water to feed our plants with. Let’s say that I find a little money and replace the windows I have and maybe put screens in to keep the mosquitoes away. Let’s say that something could happen and a little bit of money starts to flow towards me again. Not just me, but maybe everybody. Maybe something I write touches someone or someone is moved to talk to me without arresting me or killing me or insulting me. Maybe they will ask me to explain my theory of why we should not be supporting occupying colonists. Maybe they take my theory of economics seriously and start buying and supporting local interests instead of foreign ones.
Perhaps while they are at it, they will take some of my theories about saving water and why I do it to heart and everybody starts asking serious questions about ecology and global warming and about everybody having to take seriously what they do. Perhaps understanding that there are consequences to this perpetual hysterical party of ours and everybody just gets a little bit more reasonable, a little bit more friendly and a little bit more conscious. Who knows, they might even be a little more comfortable financially one way or the other.
Perhaps something good really does happen and someone decides that I was right. I couldn’t see this chain reaction of good things happening. A few apologies, a few smiles, a few forgiving people just wanted to come and hang out and sit and drink tea or something like that. Perhaps the bullying comes to an end and people start taking a serious look at preservation and ecological conservation. Perhaps even my neighbors wake up one day and genuinely understand how horrific it is to have their cars in this rather clean little picture.
Yeah that’s the thing about utopian visions. We actually can do these things. I’ve been watching Star Trek lately. You know they made these communication devices and when cell phones became a reality, everybody wanted the phone to flip up just because it was like the TV show. It meant the future was here. We had space age communications. That’s science fiction. That’s a utopian vision of the United planet Earth with abilities to travel to the Stars.
Don’t mind me if I give relevance and Credence to insects. I’m just assigning humanity to something that’s alive. I mean, if I don’t need to kill it, what’s wrong with making friends?
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