CHAPTER ONE.
Joom liked to bite my nipples after her third bottle of beer. She only drank Leo brand, because the other leading brand, Chang, was run by people who had it in for the rice farmers up north. So she said. What I noticed was that after the third beer she would drink Chang or anything else, including paint thinner, if she were in the mood to get projectile-vomit drunk. Which was not that romantic, but I respected her right to kill off her brain cells any way she wanted. When we first got together, after a night at the Bedrock Inn in Ban Phe, on the gulf of Thailand, I told her that she would always have “Idsaraphaab” with me. Meaning, she would be free to do and say and think whatever she pleased. She did not have to ask my permission to go out or to sleep all day or to chuck a plank of dried herring at me, or to drink herself into a stupor. Whatever she wanted to do was okay by me. Why? Because I loved her? Obsessed about her? Needed her tawny arms around me in the evening on the beach? Yeah, all of that. But mostly, I gave her complete freedom because when the writing bug hit me I didn’t want to be bothered with love, sex, conversation, or the price of Japanese yen on the Forex. When she saw that faraway look in my eyes she knew it was not a hankering to make love to her; it was an idea for a blog post. That’s how I made my living, posting blogs on my popular website and charging fat fees for advertising.
This particular night Joom had inhaled a huge salad of lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and canned tuna fish, doused with fish sauce and sweet chili sauce. It made her thirsty, and she was ready for her fourth bottle of beer when I saw some kind of bug on the wall in the living room and immediately began channeling my mother’s strictures against boxelder bugs back in Minnesota. That would be my next article. Joom’s amorous snappings at my pectorals did not sway me in the least.
“Thi rak” I said, “I’m going in my bedroom to write. Don’t forget to turn the porch light on so the khamoys know we’re home.” I gave her a kiss. She bit my lip until it bled. She wanted to fight with me, then go down to the beach and fall asleep in my arms. But I had to produce a new article every day, and since day was night and night was day back in the USA – that is, they were six hours behind us in Thailand -- well, Boisea trivitattus would wait for no man, no matter how horny.
My articles never flow smoothly, and it took me nearly three hours to write the Boxelder thing. It went like this:
I’ve had it up to here with boxelder bugs . . . no, come to think of it, I’ve had it up to HERE! The critters all woke up today, en masse, and are silently winging their way around in meandering, meaningless parabolas. Walking along the River Parkway I kept brushing them off like dandruff with legs. They don’t bite and they don’t carry any diseases, so I’m supposed to tolerate ‘em? Not by the hair of MY chinny chin chin!
They don’t work as bait. I’ve watched thousands of them flit down onto the river, and nothing will rise to even see what they are. Not a trout, not a carp; even the mallards, who MUST be hungry after all that spring mating, let them float by. They can’t be used like fruit flies, to check out DNA and other genetic stuff by scientists. I don’t think they have any DNA; they run on pure inertia, with no genetic code to guide them.
If we put ‘em on an endangered species list maybe they’ll disappear, but that seems unlikely; they poop out eggs in a continuous stream, and the eggs hatch in a few days, and the whole kit and caboodle fly over to a south-facing wall and lollygag in the sun, with nothing to do but crack sunflower seeds and gossip about Ashton Kutchner.
They are truly the Slackers of the bug world, filling no purpose that either man or God can determine. I’ve never seen a bird eat one. And I’ve watched, nonplussed, as a line of ants has deliberately gone around the corpse of one, disdaining to drag it back into their anthill.
