First, can I say that June bugs are drunk. Or blind. Or maybe a combination of the two. I have never seen more terrible aerobatics from any other creature. These mentally damaged insects fly like they’re lunatics. They bash into walls, into each other, into anything around them. They leap off of a perch and then take the most ridiculous flight arcs straight into something solid and then collapse to the ground, often on their backs, where they have to struggle like madmen to right themselves. They sorta remind me of me. “Hey guys, I’m outta here….aaaaaaaagghghghgh! ” *SMACK. I don’t know what sort of evolutionary purpose their insane flight paths serve, other than perhaps to dissuade other creature from eating them for fear of catching stupid off of them. They are nature’s Don Quixotes. But, they’re fun to watch. Which is fortunate, because Austin is infested with them.
Another creature that Austin is riddled with is the roach. Or, as they call them here, water beetles. I have never really associated roaches with water, mostly because growing up in the desert and then LA, there really wasn’t large bodies of water where they could do their roaching. But, jesus, do they grow them big here. They’re like half-way between the normal LA roach and the desert date-beetle. Huge monsters of disgusting plying their roachi-ness in every crevice, crack, nook, cranny, and shadow they can find. I have carried my significant antipathy for roaches with me from Los Angeles, which is good, because I have managed to kill about a score of them since I arrived. My hope is that, someday in the not too distant future, roaches will scare their baby roaches to sleep at night with stories of me. I hate the ‘effing things.
But that’s not all the interesting fauna I’ve encountered in Austin. I have seen, running around our backyard, multiple fauns. You know, a little baby deer running through our backyard, fifteen feet away from me. And the silly thing is, my first impulse when seeing the faun was, “Hmm…I wanna grab a saddle and ride that thing.” It’s too bad we never domesticated the deer and bred them for riding. I think it’d be pretty awesome to ride a deer around town. I mean, they have some serious hops. But, alas, unless I want to make a significant career change, capture some deer, and then spend the next thousand years breeding them, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. *sigh*
Well, this is Mike TV, reporting from Austin, saying, “adios, amigos!” I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
With flaming bags of foetid, fecal love,
M