Bugs

Recently, a lady named Adrian, who runs a Blog called Tales of an Educated Debutante, shared a list with her followers called, “Advice for Anyone Moving to North Carolina” that was written by a lady named Christa Hicks, and I am pretty sure I read this entire list while nodding in agreement and often enjoying a good ole inward chuckle.  But I also read this list after spending a few hours doing yard work. The list had twenty pieces of advice, all true but written with a humorous spin, but she left out a VERY big one. I’ll save you the suspense and just add it here:

 #21.  North Carolina has ALL the bugs.  And at least half of them bite any and all exposed skin. Those that do have developed an adaptation to the bug spray.  The other half are attracted to all the orifices on your head. So attracted are they that they basically rape your whole head without actual penetration.  Every single second of your time outdoors.

What is the point of these little devil shits?  They bite and buzz and irritate and make babies cry and fly kamikaze missions into your damn eyes.  The most asinine characteristic of a good number of bugs is that they are beneficial to have around because they help control the population of *insert bug name here*.  So basically the ONLY reason they exist is to eat other bugs. In other words, the predator AND his lunch are both irritably pointless.

I get bees.  They’re good.  They do the pollinating and whatnot so the flowers smell nice or produce fruit or some such crap as that.  Wasps don’t serve one single damn purpose, but bees at least keep food on the table. I think we should all like bees, okay?  Can we agree to that? Can we also agree that a biblical plague exists in North Carolina every afternoon in the summer?

Let’s do a quick rundown of WHY bugs actually exist, shall we?  In doing so, I will point out why such existence is stupid and what could have been created in their place.  It’s things like bugs that are the reason I struggle so mightily at times with the existence of a “loving” god, because why would a loving god put something on this Earth that makes me want to wrap my entire face in Cling Wrap before heading outside in the summer.  And this would be WITHOUT nose holes cut in the Cling Wrap because guess where a freaking gnat would fly?

As referenced earlier, and again depicted by someone who doesn’t spend a great deal of time caring about science, one reason bugs exist is to pollinate plants and flowers to help yield crops and whatnot.  Okay, so why not just create plants that don’t require pollination? That kinda seems like a no-brainer to me. This was just a stupid design flaw.

And yes, I know some people who read this are going to feel rather blasphemous and uneasy with me telling God he did a piss poor job with the bugs, but I think He did an amazing job with pretty much everything else, so He can handle one little rant about His creation.  He’s God. He can handle it. And if you feel blasphemous already, now might be a good time to stop reading. I’m not through with Him.

Another reason bugs exist is because they are the food source for larger animals and critters.  They are a “vital part of the food chain.” Another easy fix. All the animals and critters and varmints and vermin that currently eat insects will be re-created to now eat grass, leaves, bark, dirt, and our trash.  Done. Don’t need bugs in the food chain anymore.

Still another reason bugs exist is because they help break down and compost all or most of our waste, dead animals, dead plants, and even some of our trash.  If the bugs were gone, can’t we just burn all that crap? Yes? Well okay then. Might not be great for air quality with all the smoke and burnt particles of trash and dead animal hair flying about, but nobody gives a damn about the climate anyway, am I right?

I went to Utah last summer.  Three days, one bug. I saw one freaking bug.  How is that possible? How do the plants grow? If an elk dies in the mountains, how the hell does it decompose?  Where the hell were all the bugs in Utah? It made no sense to me. I will most likely retire there because North Carolina is home to 622 different kinds of bugs and several hundred more seemingly fly in during the summer months for what I can only assume is the touristy vibe that exists because we have both mountains AND beaches, so there’s always an appealing climate for them to settle down.  

But the damn bugs outnumber us 200 million to 1 on a normal day.  Summer in North Carolina does NOT contain normal days, though. They’re hot and sticky and sometimes stormy and they make you walk outside some days and say, “what the hell,” not because it’s just something to say when you’ve been taken aback by the heat, but because for a moment you fear that your destination is complete.

This applies to basically ANY backyard in central and eastern North Carolina, but it’s made worse if you’re near a creek or pond or abandoned above-ground pool that has, in fact, become the entire life cycle of a generation of mosquitos.

So that 200 million to 1 ratio has increased tenfold over the summer months because of all the insect relatives that quite literally come out of the woodwork, and when they reunite in central North Carolina, they thrown down!!  They get drunk as hell on human blood, procreate exponentially, and most likely complete the entire gestation and early bughood cycles over the span of a couple of days because by August, it is 200 BILLION to one.  

And it is people like me who become the pinnacle of mammalian stupidity because we walk outside every damn day refusing bug spray because we don’t want to smell like a combination of formaldehyde and burnt roadkill, and because of this the bugs just go ape shit crazy because they simply can’t let the humans actually enjoy the fruits of their labor.  

Got plans at the pool?  There will be a damn horsefly there to worry the piss clean out of you and into the new salt water pool that does a MUCH worse job destroying the urine than the old chlorine pools did.  The horseflies know this. They get high on it. They only need to bite one human per summer and their terrorist-like fear placement is set. No human can escape the fear that exists in them because of one damn horsefly.

Would you like to head into the woods with your son and explore the creek bed where you once found a cute little fawn and her mother frolicking to the sounds of the babbling brook?  You can, but when you get back home, you will have four members of the tick family either embedded in your scalp, nestled in your pubic region, or clung to an ass cheek like it shot out of a staple gun.

And if you don’t find them, remove them, and kill them?  You will get Lyme Disease. And if you don’t know you have Lyme Disease or if you say, “It was just a bug.  I’m a big strong man and I will defeat it with my big strong manly white blood cells,” your whole face can become paralyzed and you can have severe joint pain for the rest of your life.  All because you wanted to take your kid to the creek bed to find a baby deer. This is just stupid.  

It’s just ridiculous that we have to deal with these creatures.  We are the brains of this planet, and yet whoever created this place decided it was a good idea to make sure we would NOT enjoy being outside during the summer.  What the hell kind of rationale is that for making bugs?  

“I, God, have made this beautiful place called Earth, with all its magnificent bounty and all the natural resources my people will need to flourish.  But I must make them hate me and question my very existence. Bugs will do the trick. And let’s go ahead and make them vitally important to the environment, ecosystems, and the food chain so these smart humans can’t simply neutralize them.”

They just make me so mad.  The very rationale for their existence makes no sense.  You were in charge, God. You could have made humans eat through their assholes.  You could have replaced trees with giant pods of cotton candy. You could have said, “To hell with gravity.  Let them all fly.” But no, you had a bigger and better plan. Except with the bugs. They make no damn sense.  If you knew what a royal pain in the ass they were going to be, you had every ability to mark them off your master list of creatures and just make the damn food chain start a link closer to the top.  

Bugs make me want to trap some in little glass cases and deny them food and water so I can just watch them die.  That seems harsh, but they outnumber us 200 million to 1. If they evolve, they could take us down. And they’re already evolving.  Ever heard of the Zika virus? They deserve to be tortured and examples made of them. Especially those flying terrorists trying to make all the baby’s heads tiny.  

And you just can’t escape them.  It’s impossible. They come inside uninvited.  If you need to sit down and really concentrate at your computer, there WILL be a housefly there to ensure your failure.  If you want to watch the fireworks on July 4, you better lather on commercial grade bug spray like a pasty kid slopping on sunscreen at the beach or else you will be a mosquito feast.  Pointless freaking mosquitos. What the hell do they do other than feed the bats? They suck blood and the bats eat them. That’s all they do. You mean to tell me bats couldn’t eat pine cones?  Was that not allowed in the creation manual?

Ever stepped in a fire ant hill?  Within about a day, however many fire ant bites you got will start emitting this slick, clear pus that dries on there and screams, “Please pick at me!!”  And as my dermatologist once said, “You’re either a picker or you’re not.” I’m a freaking picker. I must pick at that dried pus. And when I do, it’ll pus again, and then I’ll pick again, and within about a week, I have seven fresh, new scars on my legs.  All because fire ants make about as much sense as stabbing your eyes out with shrimp forks because you have an ear infection.

And speaking of picking. What do you do when you get a mosquito bite? You press your fingernail into it. But not just once. You have to put a line of fingernail marks all the way across the bite, and why you do this is really beyond comprehension. The bite is still there. It’ll just pop right back up like it was bubble wrap and itch worse because you messed with it. And what do you do about that? You press your fingernail in it. But not just once…..

Seriously, what good do bugs do other than the stuff that they were stupidly created for?  They create an absolute freaking mess on the grill of your vehicle. Some of those things are so stuck on your car that you need a Brillo pad and an electric sander to get them off.  What other good stuff do they do? They create those wonderful spider webs that everybody loves having at their house. Or how about when you walk THROUGH a spider web? You just KNOW it’s going to be a good day when that happens. 

And if they get inside, these MENSA level specimens bounce off windows for hours trying to get out. And they don’t just bounce off the windows. They buzz and bounce and buzz and bounce and buzz until you’re ready to pour hot wax in your ears so you can just be done with the incessant buzzing that just won’t stop!!

What other pointless crap do they do?  They scare people. They can hurt you. If they don’t, they make you look like a car dealership floppy man trying to get them out of your face.  They congregate around lights and burn up all that blood they sucked out of you just to be able to suck your blood again. They ruin picnics. They eat your sandwich and leave little minute pieces of bug poop on your next bite.

In my opinion, they are the stupidest creation.  Tornados and hurricanes and cancer and murderers are bad, but bugs are the everyday nuisance.  They were put here to drive you batshit crazy every single day. Depending on where you live, the other stupid creations are just not that common.  In North Carolina, you might encounter two tornadoes in your lifetime, twenty-five hurricanes, and well, at most one murderer, but bugs you must learn to hate every single day of your life.

And you can’t get away from them.  Every state on the entire east coast has at least 500 insects that call their state home.  North Carolina is near the top at 622, but the further south you go, that number barely trickles upward.  And when you go out west, you can still plan on between 400 and 600 species of insects. So where are your bugs, Utah?

You will never guess which state has the least number of insect species.  I’m still not quite sure I believe it, but since everything on the internet is true, I know it’s correct.  The state with the least number of insect species is Hawaii with 293. That’s a hundred less than Utah, and I saw one bug in three damn days.  

Aloha, you buggy bitches.  I’m retiring to Hawaii.  In 25 freaking years.