A Bug's Life™
Some ongoing gastrointestinal difficulties kept me away from the table today, but this afternoon I felt well enough to walk to the store. On my way back, I was stalked by a
deerfly.
I my youth, I had taught myself the trick of trapping and killing deerflies by attaching the bottom of my hands, splay-fingered, to the top of my head on either side, as if my hands were a tiny pair of moose antlers.
The deerflies can't seem to resist landing one of my hands or fingers when I'm in this pose. As soon as I feel the landing, I slap my hands together and crush the deerfly between them.
So I stood on the sidewalk, with my bag of stuff from the store on the ground at my side, next to a busy road, and I did my moose impression for a while, while people drove by in presumable wonder, but no murderous joy this time. The deerfly flew away without landing on the bait.
Perhaps I killed so many with that trick when I was young that I unwittingly helped to breed a strain of smarter deerflies in my local area. That got me thinking about how many insects and spiders I've murdered so far in my lifetime. I'm not talking about simple bugslaughter—all of us have splatted and run over thousands and thousands of bugs with our cars and trucks over the years—I'm talking about deliberate, premeditated killing...Murder 1.
When I was a boy, I was a cruel psychopath to bugs. I used to pull the deerfly trick whenever they were around, which was often if it was summer; I would kill houseflies by clapping my hands together two inches above them, and they could rarely resist hopping straight up into that press of death; I never just brushed off mosquitos, they had to die, and the patio of my childhood home often hosted ants, and I would respond to their presence by taking out a basketball and dribbling it around.
Fortunately, I never graduated in my cruelty on to "higher" animals like cats and dogs. I've always loved cats. Dogs? Eh, the species has shown a little too much willingness to lick the Man's boots and become attack dogs and K-9 drug sniffers and whatnot, but I would never willingly hurt a dog. It would cause me a lot of emotional pain to hear a dog whimper and know that I was the reason for it.
So why are bugs different? What about the thousands of insects I've deliberately murdered in my lifetime? If there's an afterlife, will I be made to atone for all of these malevolent killings? Should insect and arachnid lives be valued the same as all other living creatures?
Those were my thoughts as I walked back from the store. I became so preoccupied with them that I let myself into the wrong apartment building, and I had to turn directly around, walk out, and skulk over to my own building, hoping that no one had seen me.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 06-17-2024 at 08:24 PM.