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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
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| June/July
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Winners,
Finalists & Honorable Mentions from the August/ September 2005
Contest will be featured in our Humor
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October/ November 2005 Contest is
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"Buggin’ Out in Florida"
By Lorrie
MacDonald, Temple Terrace FL
Honorable Mention
When I moved from Chicago to Tampa, Florida in December, I knew I’d have to make some adjustments. In return for beautiful weather, pristine beaches and friendly neighbors who actually introduced themselves and brought over bundt cakes, I knew I’d have to live with a lot of bugs.
At first I tried to kill them all, a lone vigilante against these environmental equivalents to gang lords. The strongest factions were mosquitoes (Blood), palmetto bugs (the Creeps) and wasps (Hell’s Angels).
I carried around pocket-sized Raid like it was Mace, and kept a rolled-up newspaper in my back pocket. I’d take off my pumps and do a drive-by hurling when I saw a palmetto bug scurry across my living room. To prevent the body from going into squeamish-girl spasms during these rumbles, I’d yell, “Feeling lucky, punk?” or “I KNOW you’re not talkin’ to me!”
But none of these maneuvers worked against the enemy. By their sheer numbers and breeding powers, they reinforced their enlistment within days, sometimes hours, of the slaughter I inflicted.
The only thing my bug-killer instinct did was worry my Floridian friends that I would never adjust to the place.
They decided I needed intervention. “No, no,” my neighbor Alicia said one day while observing me stalk a big, hairy spider crawling on the ceiling. “Let that one be. House spiders eat mosquitoes, and help keep down the population.” Then she scooped it in a mason jar and tossed the spider outside. I thought I heard a “thunk” when it hit the ground.
“What about those disgusting flying cockroaches the size of hummingbirds?” I asked. I would take no part in any ecosystem-balancing act for those Creeps. “Boric acid,” she said and showed me where to sprinkle the powder in my kitchen.
So, little by little, I begrudgingly coexisted with the bugs, unleashing genocide in my house when needed, applying mosquito repellent like a favorite perfume when I ventured outside in the evenings, and hosing down pineapple-sized wasps’ nests from the entrance eaves with a shrug. They’d be back in three days.
By the 1st of May, I thought I had the bug issue under control. Feeling particularly smug that spring day, I drove the seven miles to work (my Chicago friends swore they would hire a hit man if I mentioned the commute again) and parked my new Altima on the
second-level, open parking lot. As I stepped out into the awesome sunshine, I noticed a flurry of black specks coming down from the sky. They looped and dipped erratically toward the car hoods, onto the ground, and in my face. They were bugs. It was raining
bugs!
My intervention specialists had never discussed the probability of bug rainfall. I ran around the open garage like Chicken Little, horrified to discover that this species had no fear and kept landing on me. A co-worker got out of her car and walked up to me quickly. She averted eye contact as I twitched and flicked my way through a self-induced seizure. She said, “These are love bugs. They come once in May and once in September, and they won’t hurt you. They will ruin your car’s finish, though, so remember to wash them off.”
Love bugs? I stared at the critter still on my arm. Actually there were two of them; they seemed fused at the butt and pointing in opposite directions. Another pair lit on my arm; same compromising position. Then another, and it suddenly dawned on
me: I was in the middle of a big bug orgy, an eyewitness to the mating rites of 6-legged exhibitionists, demonstrating their free love beyond the hidden insect world and into the wide, open spaces, reveling in their own little Woodstock.
I shook off the offending perverts; I wasn’t going to serve as a Motel 6 for their pleasure.
Then I remembered my car. Like a mama grizzly, I ran toward my new Altima to survey any damage. “My baby,” I cooed to the headlights covered in little twisted Kama Sutra bodies.
So, this was how it was going to be, a turf war with a new gang (the Nymphos) that rode into town twice a year, trying to destroy that which I loved and still held 60 monthly payments on.
Alicia could not console me with her advice of “You learn to live with them.”
What I learned was: in May and September, I take the bus.
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