Achtung! Cranefly at 8 o'clock!

Okay, so yeah... I hate autumn, as you might already know. But one thing I can bear is that one by one, the insects drop out of the sky like the...well... insects they are, as their life cycle ends or they go into hibernation. Though hopefully the former.

But it seems as though those little winged shits are carrying out their kind of... last stand of the year. I've been invaded.

I'll be the first to put my hands in the air and admit: my house is not clean. Hell, it's not even semi-clean. It's a dump. There are empty bottles, boxes and piles of junk everywhere. And yes, it virtually has it's own ecosystem now, complete with small prey, slightly bigger predators... and the occasional killer whale passing through.

But that's all fine and good... so long as the things don't come near me and moreover... don't have wings.

Indeed, the number of winged insects invading my turf seems to have increased massively over the past few weeks or so. Perhaps it's because my cat has a troubling habit of eating any of the said insects' predators? Possibly. Perhaps it's because I'm hated by most animals worldwide? More than likely. But whatever the cause, they're still here... and they still scare the crap out of me.

I admit that yes, I am scared of most things with wings and six legs... but surely having something fly at your face at two in the morning in darkness is enough to make anybody give out a feeble yelp no matter if they're typically wary of them or not?

And then there's the appearance of the little buggers I've witnessed. Crane flies... aren't so bad- despite their large, dangly bodies... I know they can't hurt me; but I've come across these really funky... things with a bright red stinger several times before. Fuck knows what they are... but holy crap, they know how to scare someone (though the ones I've encountered weren't expecting to end up at the wrong end of some fine literature I had laying around, of course... why else would I have the printed word in my house?)

It's not only their outward appearance that really messes with my mind, either. It's the fact that they tend to dart about randomly, and at great pace. Side to side, up and down... and then into your face. Hell, even as I write this, I'm watching something out of the corner of my eye fly erratically around me. Or failing that, how they hang from the ceiling, unmoving, for hours on end. I swear, those little shits are conspiring to send me insane or something.

And that's not all. Since less and less pesticide is being used nowadays, there's much less insects getting their brains fried by lethal chemicals and therefore just... more of them. I could never see what was wrong with highly toxic pesticide, anyway. Sure, some had the effects of napalm and others poisoned the watering hole and made several villages have chronic diarrhoea for a few weeks... but that's a damn worthwhile trade off for people like me having to fight a neverending battle with winged critters with blood-drawing mandibles... right? Besides... you never know when you're gonna need a napalm substitute anyway. You can never have enough incenderies and explosives.

But anywhoo... back to bugs.

Even when you do get lucky and crush the flying fuckers with an issue of NI, the Iliad of Homer or a 2x4 plank (I should really finish trying to build that Ikea thing... I've forgotten what it's actually supposed to be now)... there's still the cleanup. Scraping guts off of the wall is never very nice, no matter what or who the guts belonged to. Urgh.

If anything, this just goes to demonstrate just how important lethal, river polluting chemicals really are. No matter what any dipshit environmentalist or... law says.