I'M CHIMPANZEES

On my way to work this morning I found myself singing The Irish Rover's 'Unicorn Song' under my breath, but for some I was compulsively replacing the phrase "you got" with "I am," so that the chorus ended up as "I am your green alligators and long-necked geese/ I'm your humpy-back camels and chimpanzees/ I'm your cats and rats and elephants/ But Lord I'm so forlorn/ I'm just not your unicorn". The modified chorus amused me but left me feeling like a three-year old child imposing his emerging identity on everything around him. Or maybe Walt Whitman in the final stages of dementia.¹

CITY OF BUGS

The wasps are out. And the blackflies, and the gnats, and the houseflies and horseflies and the green grasshoppers and the brown grasshoppers and the mottled grasshoppers, which I think of as locusts. Which they are. The ladybugs are out, and the sowbugs are crawling across the floor, and the deerflies crowd the lake beaches and swarm on sweat. The bees are out, and the cabbage moths hide in the cabbages, and the dragonflies pursue the mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes pursue us, and we call the exterminator about the silverfish problem. The ticks lurk in the tall grass and the maple bugs gather by the floorboards. Beetles crawl up stone walls at night and fly headlong into pedestrians. Fruit flies storm the garbage, dust mites inhabit our skin, and some really ugly bug was in our medicine cabinet the other day. Tentworms drop on silk lines from elm trees, caterpillars cross the lawn, earthworms do the best they can with no eyes and a diet of dirt. Ants crawl, crawl, crawl and I have it on good authority that they get nothing done. Grasshoppers fly up from the grass like water hitting hot oil.²

YOUNG FLESH FOR OLD CANNBIBALS

Who wants to devour Echo Boomers³ whole? The Episcopalians sound peckish, Saurage Research is feeling hungry, and Teen Research Unlimited comes off like a bloated Roman emperor barely able to roll to one side to take a piss and stuff more into his mouth. Or perhaps that's a more apt description for the Frankensuers at Fox.

²Across the street from my office is a gravel-and-scrub lot that gets used only for parking during football games (they call it "event parking"). I walk back and forth across the lot every day, surrounded by a cloud of locusts sent into mindless leaping panic at my approach. They're so thickly packed that the sound of their leaping and hitting the ground sounds like bacon frying. I love covering the last thirty metres of my walk to work in the centre of a locust swarm.

³Echo boomers, as the name suggests, are the kids born between 1977-1994 or so. Marketers and others have already sunk their teeth into this new prized demographic, even though their incomes in most cases range from allowance-level to entry-level wages. It's a Logan's Run of the mind.

parode - exode