I’ve determined that nothing awakens your inner blood-lust and desire to kill like a fruit fly buzzing around stupidly in front of your computer screen.  So dumb and little flying there in my direct line of sight.  I don’t know why they make me so angry.  Maybe it’s because fruit flies are so small?  They’re too insignificant to deserve the right to continue living but just big enough to incite an instant desire to eradicate them.  I’m sure they have a purpose in God’s grand scheme but you could not see one of those little bastards all year and sure enough, pour a glass of red wine and voila, there’s a fruit fly buzzing around.  It’s incomprehensible!  Where the hell do they come from?  My house could be completely free of over-ripened fruit for five years and suddenly, out of nowhere, one will appear and try to land in my cabernet or go up my nose.

Other bugs get me going too. Early awakening flies are a particular anger-inducer.  They just buzz and lope around, slow and stupid, looking for someone to annoy.  You can tell their skills at annoyance are fuzzy early in the season.  It’s like they just woke up and didn’t have any coffee yet.  They just land on you and buzz against the window pane trying to enter that mystical outdoor world just on the other side of the glass.   I’ve visualized getting a shotgun out to blast those early-spring flies.  I’d shoot my entire house to un-recognizeable Swiss cheese to kill one of those retarded bastards.  I mean, after spending three great insect-free winter months (six in Wisconsin) it hits sixty degrees one day, and out they come.  The first one you see really gets you livid and off your duff hunting for a magazine to swat the little fucker.  I tore my entire kitchen apart trying to find where I stored the fly swatter once as a slow-witted early fly buzzed around the living room.  “Go ahead you little son-of-a-bitch, just try and land on the TV screen again!  I’ve got a bead on you with my Remington!“

First-awakening bugs seem to come out of nowhere.  It’s as if you feel that if you could kill just one female fly early in the season and you’d upset the delicate balance of reproduction for an entire family of burgeoning flies.  You have to kill just that one!

Don’t get me started on mosquitoes.  Six months of winter finally ends and you get determined to grill something and eat it outside on your patio.  All it takes is a couple rainstorms to spawn a mosquito hatch and your deck is rendered useless until late-fall.  Mosquitoes will stalk you mercilessly to see if you have the wherewithal to actually make it through dinner.  I lost a pint of blood one night last summer.   I was going to eat that damned burger outdoors if it was the last thing I did.  But, the bugs ultimately won.  Inside I went, yearning for the first frost.

I blame Wisconsin weather.  Six months of cold and shitty followed by six months of hot, buggy, and shitty.  It’s a perfect storm of bug-breeding nirvana around here.  Box Elder bugs, no-seeums, black flies, and wasps. Take your pick.  They all love Wisconsin.