I think it’s very important for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.  ~ Kamala Harris

The puppy has this simultaneously annoying yet endearing habit of bringing weird shit into the house.  Unfortunately, sometimes that weird shit is alive.  Such was the case the other night, I believe, when, as I was just about to shut off the lights in the kitchen, I saw this ghastly fucking bug sort of undulating unpleasantly in the middle of the floor.  This malignant-looking mutation has the face of a nightmare, a weird yellow thorax (I don’t know what the parts of insects are called…I’m not an ickyologist) with horrible yellow legs, all lugging along this weird, swollen, bulbous ass.  [It just occurred to be that the previous sentence could be used to accurately describe any of the Kardashian girls, but this thing is even more monstrous and grotesque than they are.] It is wretched, foul, and ghastly and I hate that it exists.

I’m told by people who know, that when I see any kind of insect in the house, but especially spiders and anything I can’t easily identify, and also anything big enough that it looks like it might fight back (fortunately there aren’t too many of those in Northern California),  this is what they hear: “Oh hell no!  Fuck off!” which is then followed by a loud bang when whatever I am using to smash the creature hits whatever hard surface the creature is standing on, absolutely flattening the bastard, or a series of bangs interspersed with me yelling “motherfucker,” indicating that I’m dealing with a bug that moves quickly and/or knows how to hide.

Which is exactly what happened with this atrocity I found writhing on the kitchen floor.  Except normally, the time between me seeing an insect and the time that insect ceases to be is a second or two.  But this thing was so weird that I took a couple of seconds before murdering it to try to figure out exactly what the hell it was.  I only allowed myself to get so close out of fear of the thing jumping onto my face and doing horrible and perverse things.  But I couldn’t identify the thing, so I annihilated it where it writhed.  The insect was large enough that there was some light clean up involved, but the real problem had been solved: this mutant menace had been eliminated.

But things got really weird the next day, when I saw not one but two separate posts of the same meme by some local friends that featured this picture:

Yep, it was that same big bitch bug I had killed the night before.  But the caption on the meme was imploring those who see this bug in their gardens to not only not kill it, but to leave it completely alone.  “Benefits to your garden…” and such.  Everything under the picture was written in the anthropomorphized first person: “Please don’t kill me!  Even though I look scary, I am just a potato bug, or Jerusalem Cricket.”  Et cetera.  I shuddered to think of the limp-wristed, Disneyesque mind that came up with this garbage.

Despite all the counter-intuitive advice to not kill these things on site, it did give me a name to work with. Jerusalem Cricket.  You are my new enemy.  Your kind now join all spiders targeted by my Arachnojihad, which I’ve been waging for at least 40 years now.

It’s this sort of thing that kept me from being a Buddhist: the karma I must be racking up for all these bugs I unrepentantly kill is, I’m sure, staggering.  They would always try to lay that nonsense about one’s mother being reincarnated as any living thing, therefore you must never kill any living thing because it could be your reincarnated mother.  But, from my perspective, I’d be doing anyone I cared about a massive existential favor by ending their incarnation as some miserable insect as quickly as possible.

N.P.: “Ready or Not” – Manbreak