All The Bugs In My Front Yard, Ranked By How Much They Make My Wife Say, "Oh My God, What Is That?"
Out of my way, E.O. Wilson!
On Sunday, June 8th, I will be performing at the Some Fun Lines satire reading showcase at Caveat in New York City. It is hosted by Jonathan Appel, Chandler Dean, and Maeve Dunigan, and features a ton of terrific writers reading satire. I’d love to see you there! Buy tickets here.
Despite humanity’s concerted efforts, the Earth is full of a dizzying assortment of creatures, ranging from invisible-to-the-naked-eye single-celled organisms to creatures over twice as big, such as the Sumatran Elephant, or CNN’s Anderson Cooper. As any entomologist will gleefully tell you—often while you are trying to talk about something else—a huge majority of the Earth’s animal species are—I hope readers will forgive me for using a technical term here—bugs. Of those bugs, a huge majority resides in my front yard.
Another one of Earth’s amazing creatures is my wife. Since the dawn of time, my wife and bugs have harbored deep mutual animus for each other. I have not confirmed this with the bugs, but my wife is quite certain.
Usually, my wife does not need to interact with bugs, but this weekend was an exception. We were removing a few stumps in our front yard, and my wife disapproved of the Wile E. Coyote-esque tactics I was using.1 So she determined that the stump removals were probably a two-person job.
Unfortunately, stumps reside chiefly underground, which happens also to be where bugs live. During our excavations, we encountered a number of bugs, which elicited a narrow but intense range of reactions from my wife. I will rank them from 0 to 10, 0 being laissez-faire, “Oh, is that a bug?” 10 being sound-the-alarms, “This is armageddon.”
ANTS: Outside, ants are not a big deal. My wife hates seeing ants inside, like on the kitchen counter, or darting out of one of my nostrils to fetch a small crumb off my upper lip, but out in the wild, they are just not as scary. 8.9/10
EARTHWORMS: Sure, they’re wet and wriggly, and occasionally you’ll unearth one of the ones with psychic powers that temporarily forces you to take big chunks of your paycheck and place improbable parlays on the MGM sports betting app, but in general, earthworms—lacking teeth or legs, and being fairly slow—are not that scary. 9.1/10
DADDY LONG LEGS: With their quick scurry and their unnerving ability to blend into their environment, Daddy Long Legs are supremely creepy. When I did standup, one of my favorite jokes went like this: “This is my impression of a Daddy Long Legs spider,” and then I would mime a very confident person sticking out their hand for a handshake and say, “Oh, please, my father is Daddy Long Legs. I’m Barry, Barry Long Legs.”2 So I always have fond associations with them, but this—incredibly—is not enough to spare my wife’s ire. 9.5/10
BEES: Fair is fair: My wife is allergic to bees. 9.8/10
CICADAS: My research tells me that “Brood XIV”3 of the classic-style seventeen-year cicadas will be out this summer, and to them, I say: I am sorry for digging you out of the ground with a pickaxe before you were ready. It’s possible that they just hadn;’t had time to “put their face on” before emerging for several weeks of pleasant, deafening buzzing, but these guys were truly disturbing—wet, pale, essentially like Darth Vader when he removes his mask. Horrifying. 9.9/10
Notes:
Why did I write this? I think of myself as a citizen naturalist, and feel compelled to make rigorous, scientific observations of the environment and share them with the public.
What I’m reading: Flaws and Fallacies in Statistical Thinking by Stephen K. Campbell. I found this 1974 book in a used bookstore, I think. I took statistics in high school, and remembered it all seeming quite useful without retaining a whole lot of actual, useful information. This book is a fun exploration, with examples, of the different ways people misuse and abuse statistical concepts.
Relax—I do not mean to say that I was trying to blow up the stumps with sticks of dynamite. Whenever you Google “how to make explosives in your home CHEAP,” I learned, you are promptly visited by very serious people from one of our nation’s law enforcement agencies who—despite otherwise being consummate professionals—show very little interest in your stump removal problems. So, you are forced to execute comical-looking but eminently practical solutions, like wedging yourself a few feet off the ground between the front of your house and a stump and performing a “leg press,” an exercise you formerly neglected but will attack with new vigor during your next visit to the YMCA.
Now, perhaps, you are understanding why you have not yet seen my Netflix special.
Presumably they picked this name because they couldn’t think of anything more ominous.
ahhh this explains the distant screams i heard this weekend. i thought it was an impeding gift from my friends up north !