I've been scared of various things, off and on, throughout my life. My fears have varied in degree of severity from the completely inane and ridiculous to the more recognizable fears of psychologically damaging events. Some of those fears that would inhabit the former list were childhood fears of my six-year-old friends finding out that I was playing kitchen with the girl down the street (and I made her run out the back when they'd ring the bell in the front!) and the fear that my mom forgot to put my pudding cup in my Happy Days lunch box. Some of the fears occupying the latter list would include my more serious fears of getting outbid on eBay and being attacked to death by killer bugs.
No, wait!
I know you're used to reading the gobbledigook on these pages and thinking, "Oh, that guy. He's such a kidder."
But this is different. I am really afraid of getting waylaid by killer bugs. It's something that grips me viscerally and tears at my innards viciously and relentlessly at the worst times. (And this innard-tearing action is, of course, how killer bugs will one day do me in.)
This completely rational fear started like most lifelong, deeply-rooted and psychologically significant fears start: with a game of barefoot wiffleball in the hazardous backyard of suburbia. I pitched one of my almost-patented sidewinder-uppercut balls and landed smack dab on a honeybee. I lifted my foot, and there he was, doing the Curly Shuffle around his stinger on my sole. I flicked him off, pulled the stinger out, and thought I better go put some ice on it.
It didn't hurt all that badly. But within a few minutes my foot was the size of a Big Bird slipper; and after about a half hour, my body was infested with madly itching red hives from head to toe. When my breathing started getting funny, I went and found my dad, who luckily had only downed a few Falstaff's while he was watching golf and agreed to drive me to the ER.
I don't remember much after that, except the ER doc said he was going to give me one shot that would speed me up a little, then another that would slow me WAY down. He wasn't lying. I was drooling in a matter of seconds and my last lucid memory of the day was of my dad laughing at my incontinence.
That was a long time ago. But in all those years, I've maintained a healthy dose of fearful respect for my little six-legged and winged stinging nemeses. I even carried epi-pens everywhere for years and years until I realized that the only thing I was allergic to was honeybees. I've been stung without consequence by plenty of wasps and yellowjackets since then, but only in small doses. So, as I tucked more years (and cheeseburgers) under my belt, I lost a little of the panicked fear I displayed when a bee would fly into an open car window. (Ever see a six-foot-two guy trying to drive from the passenger seat?)
All that changed recently. Any loss of respect for all things with a stinger was regained in scores as I made my way around the front yard with the recently-repaired mower. Life was great! The sun was shining. Bills were paid. Dog was fed and to my knowledge wasn't pooping or peeing anywhere in the house. It didn't get much better than this.
What I didn't know was that there was a subversive plot underway, scant inches from my proposed path of calculated lawn maintenance. After the de-traumatizing process and revisiting the scene of the havoc, I've pieced together the most probable sequence of events and will share them with you as follows:
Sometime in the recent past, a small and unidentified band of world-hating yellowjackets took up residence under the rotted-out wooden beams surrounding the much-hated evergreen bushes in my front yard. There they recruited and reproduced their brood, turning it into an ever-increasing, mildly-controlled mob of black and yellow ominousness. They trained in silence, zipping carefully to and from the local flower beds and wooden siding, nectaring in inauspicious anonymity, right under our very noses.
Neighbors saw them, and - thinking they were typical 'flower pollinating insects'- left them alone to help nature and all those ecological, politically appropriate things people are supposed to do. So, as we worried about things like global warming and how to maximize our Steak 'n Shake coupons, they were plotting, planning, conniving, and generally pumping themselves up for an attack so heinous - so devastating - it would rock the foundations of life as we (or at least I) know it.
Unbeknownst to me, this subversive, swarming cell of malcontents were plotting to drive me out of my house in one horrible, devastating, epic strike of terror against me, right in my own front yard during broad daylight, and in front of loved ones and friends alike. After long minutes of focused research, I've theorized on the probable cause for this attack: Take over one house in the heart of suburbia, grow their numbers to the billions silently and unobserved from the confines of what once were my living room and sock drawers, and then push out southward, probably to Destin, Florida, where all my neighbors go on vacation, ruining life as we all know it.
When D-Day arrived, I was completely unaware. It was Pearl Harbor revisited on a lawn of overgrown, almost green zoysia. I mowed contentedly along the perimeter of my yard, getting as close as I could to every edge and wall to minimize any weed-whacking, which would have to wait a week because I forgot to buy more line at Home Depot. After my first pass over their hidden murderous headquarters, they swarmed into action, pulsing like the killer mass they were, just under the strip of lawn I had mowed. They waited patiently, a black and yellow mob of seething death. When I returned, they signalled the attack buzz.
I couldn't hear them over the sound of the mower and the guitar solo to Detroit Rock City, which I was humming loudly to myself.
They attacked without mercy. They swarmed over me without me even knowing they were there. I felt something painful under my sunglass arm, reached up and - realizing it was a bee of some kind - hit myself in the head so hard my precious prescription sunglasses (which I nurse like a ten dollar shot of Patron) were sent flying somewhere unknown and uncared-about. Suddenly, pain shot up my leg. I looked down and there they were, the main attack squadron, dive bombing my leg just above my work boot (which I wear to avoid any mower-related toe injuries, which I know from personal experience of a past neighbor, is NO fun.) I swatted and they pursued the attack. Wave after wave of the sinister beasts came from the ground and headed for Objective 1 (ME!). I couldn't hit them off fast enough. They were literally stinging the HELL out of me.
Fearing for my life against a formless, swarming mob, I did what any red-blooded suburban lawn-mowing guy would do. I ran like hell through the garage and into my kitchen. (Apparently the YouTube version of my escape has been kindly documented and posted as "Suburban Moron Dances Like Idiot Over a Few Bugs.)
Eyewitness reports from my wife reveal that upon entering the kitchen I was yelling incoherently and possibly in a foreign tongue. When she arrived, apparently she thought my gall bladder had burst, or maybe I had just won the lottery but lost the ticket or something of that nature. After staring at me for a few moments, I gathered myself and told her I had just had the CRAP stung out of me.
"Oh, my God! What should I do?!?" she screamed.
"Ice!"
She put a couple measly cubes into a Ziplock. I proceeded to attempt to tend to about a thousand red welts with a tiny packet of two cubes, which were already half melted from my feverish post-attack heat.
"OH MY GOD! THERE'S A BEEEEE!" She yelled and pointed, dancing kind of like Wilma Flintstone when Fred would run into a stone wall and knock himself out. And yep, there was another one, digging into the back of my calf.
I flicked him off. He left his stinger in me as a reminder of the devastating can of whoop-ass they opened on me today. I watched him circle helplessly on the linoleum at my boot, his kamikaze mission accomplished for the greater glory of the hive.
"Die, you son-of-a-bitch," I thought as I moved my first aid cubes from one part of my body to another. "Die."
"Oh, honey! Kill it! Kill it!" she yelled. Writhing in pain and near death myself, I looked at her and sighed. I stepped on it, but it kept slipping into the waffled bottom. After several failed attempts, she got me a paper towel, and I squished the life out of it.
I figured I better inventory the rest of my parts, and sure enough I found another one lurking in my sock, waiting patiently for the second wave of attacks.
"Oh, honey..." she said, giving me that look that said something was seriously wrong with me (which I usually got when she didn't like the outfit I was going to wear out that night.) "What can I get you? A benadryl? I don't think we have any? How about one of those other things we have, you know, those one things we use for..."
"Just get me a beer."
"Huh? A beer? Do you think you sh..."
"Please. Just get me a beer." By this time my leg felt like it had a hundred Chinese guys doing acupuncture on it from knee to ankle. My head was throbbing above my ear. And I realized that I had a stinger stuck in the palm of my right hand below the thumb, which felt like it was the size of the Keep On Truckin' bumper stickers from the 70's. I figured booze was good enough for those Civil War soldiers that had to get a gangrenous leg chopped off, so getting drunk seemed like a genetically appropriate choice to prepare myself for whatever God-awful things were going to happen to me.
She got me one, and one more ice bag. (By the way, Ziplocks leak.) The beer was inhaled in about ten swallows, and by that time, I needed it. The right side of my body felt like an atomic pincushion. But I flashed back to my younger years and the honeybee incident, and realized I wasn't covered in hives and my breathing wasn't becoming all Darth Vaderish, so I figured I wasn't going to die.
"Oh, honey, you should go to Urgent Care."
"Pffffft. I'm fine. It just hurts a little. I'll be fine. How about another beer?"
"But I seriously think you should let me take you to Urgent Care. You're pretty messed up." By this point, even the dog was letting me know I was in bad shape. Typically upon entering the kitchen, he'd be slinking between my legs, tripping my every step, and divebombing my crotch and tailfins with excitement. Right now, he was hiding behind Keri and looking up forlornly at me through his Marty Feldman eyes.
I guess as a man I have an anti-UrgentCare gene blasted into my DNA or something, because the only thing that would have gotten me to Urgent Care then was a second attack of those little horrible black and yellow things chasing me there. So she relented and got me another beer, shaking her head and mumbling wifely things under her breath.
So, with typical male stubbornness, I forced myself through the rest of the day in ridiculous amounts of pain. Ridiculous, mostly, because it came as a result of a stupid little bug the size of my pinky nail (which just happened to be one of the few pain-free parts of my body.)
But, also in typical male-ness, I had one great dose of sanity left. Like Willem Dafoe in Platoon, bullet ridden and trying desperately to make it to the chopper alive, I stumbled my way into the garage. The sun had set on this day of infamy, and I - hero if only to my little patch of suburbia - vowed to leave the last mark. So, as Doolittle prepared his bombers to strike at the heart of the Japanese war machine in the first post-Pearl Harbor counterattack, I grabbed my can of Spectracide Hornet and Wasp Killer and stalked to the enemy's lair.
Reading the directions through venom-swollen eyes, I shook the can vigorously. Under the phosphorescent glow of the front porch light, I glided silently upon the hole at the bottom of the wooden beam. Taking aim, I squeezed my non-swollen thumb against the trigger and unleashed hell upon the unsuspecting infidels. The white stream pounded into their den. I pictured the liquid death tidal-waving down the tunnel, into the main hive, killing everything in its path. I visualized the filthy, segmented-body vermin gasping for life-affirming air, only to find none. And when I thought they'd had enough, just to honor the memory of my good health that morning, I let them have another round. And another.
The next morning, before painfully succumbing to Keri's "I told you so's" and letting her drive me to Urgent Care, I inspected the bombing zone of the night before. There outside the opening of the terror cell, lay scattered, battle-torn bodies of several yellow jackets. If you disapprove of my anti-ecological counter strike against those God-hating heathens, then get the hell off my blog.
I'm heading out again tonight after dark with the well shaken can for a second counter-strike.
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