Love Bugs
Sex, slaughter, and the inconvenience of nature
The love bugs are everywhere, coating surfaces like paint overspray – harmless and annoying.
Maybe you don’t know about love bugs. They’re these little creatures (as bugs tend to be) that appear once a year in great quantities around the gulf coast and particularly in Texas and Louisiana. Besides their black body and tiny red thorax, their most distinct feature is that which gives them their name – they’re attached butt-to-butt. Yep, these little bugs are nymphos. They make an orgy out of every doorway.
They drift lazily about as if the only destination that ever mattered was their partner’s genitals.
I really must stress that these bugs are harmless. They don’t even make a buzzing noise. Were it not for their numbers, they’d probably go unnoticed. But boy, do they have the numbers. You know the racket cicadas make once every seven years? Now, imagine how many you’re picturing and turn them into a tiny, silent sex-swarm. That’s what it feels like.
The combination of large masses and lazy flying results in constant human-assisted suicides. Each time I open my door I’m forced to view the dozens of bodies accumulating in the crack like some Warhammer battlefield. Often, I’ll brush off a strange sensation from my hand and find it’s a bug lovers in their final embrace.
I’ve been successfully ignoring them, save the mourning that accompanies bugslaughter, but my roommates have been struggling. A particularly unfortunate circumstance is an ill-fit back door that leads to an office I’ve been finishing for Eleonore. The house has moved since the door was installed (years ago, I’m not at fault here) leaving a gap between the door and the frame. I have named this gap Thermopylae, though I lack three hundred men to guard it.
It’s the strangest invasion I’ve heard of. It’s almost accidental the way they wander in. Once they’re inside, they just continue to drift and fuck. No stinging. No sound. “Is this our enemy?” I wonder as I sweep up the black spots littering the floor.
I should be taking drastic measures. That’s something a good human would do. Maybe I should tape up the door in plastic? I bet there’s some kind of gas I could spray.
Or if I want to go big, I could erect insect netting around the entire house. Of course, they’d get through whenever someone enters or exits, so I’d have to erect two sets of insect netting for an airlock system. I probably couldn’t finish it in time for this season, but there’s a cyclicality to these things.
I try not to make long term decisions to solve short term problems, but when a couple of these little guys lands on your skin and it tickles a bit — then you see their little legs dancing as they copulate, making you their unicorn — It is rather icky isn’t it?
I dunno. Maybe I’ll just fix the door in a few weeks.
***
That was where this essay was going to end. A nice little philosophical musing. Then a new construction project highlighted the trauma of interacting with these insects.
I’m painting a buttload of baseboards and door casing trim. I have it set up between two sawhorses under a canopy that I am very grateful for in Texas September. I only realized my great folly moments before popping the paint can (thank goodness). How could I paint these outside with all the love bugs flying aimlessly about?
The answer was to use three different fans and a good bit of my own lungs, but I am become death. So many flailed in their last moments, rear legs or perhaps just their fuck buddy’s appendages anchoring them to the toxic doom. A couple flew into the paint tray. I thought them long dead, but found they were still wiggling helplessly when I put the paint away.
I choose to believe it was a mercy to kill them. What else could it be? I suppose there’s a chance I interrupted a new, paint-resistant breed, but even I’m not that ridiculous.
Should I not paint? Halt my work? Perhaps disavow living in a home at all, given the doorway that dooms these diminutive denizens of earth. The thought makes me sigh. Even if I were to live in a hutch I made myself, I would continue my accidental genocide every time I turned in my sleep.
So, as usual, I simply continue to live like a deep sigh. Don’t take offense, Mother Nature, I’m just self-regulating after all this death.
From the Rift
If I’d written this essay a couple years ago, it would have been from a much different vantage. A baby squirel and a water oak are to thank for that.
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