Bug information

Hello friends,

I am telling you about bugs.

Reader Jeff B wanted to know about bugs.

Bugs are some of the smallest guys in town, even borrowers and hiders see them as animals. If you have seen something moving around and it was so small it could use one of those flattened pennies you get at the zoo as a surfboard, it was probably a bug. I suppose what I am saying here applies mostly to America, I know in Australia bugs are so big they can and do steal cars. I understand if you begrudge me my frame of reference! When I started writing this newsletter a little over 5 years ago I knew I'd end up saying something about bugs that got me killed. I can't change the alignment of the planets, do what you're gonna.

Anyways these small pauls are often thought of as creepy crawlies, people are constantly killing them for the feelings of disgust they engender in human beings. It is unfortunate we can't live in harmony with bugs, but when a fly is buzzing around or you see a cockroach skittering around your house it activates the part of your brain designed for strategy and harm. Maybe if you get very good at buddhism you can shut that off, but I do think part of it is that if bugs really like being in your house it is likely to be dirty in a way that isn't so good for your health and some bugs' attitude to human bodies is our attitude to the ecosystem. That might be a very american attitude on my part, maybe in France it is normal to have house worms and our wormless houses seem sterile and without good cheer to them. It's impossible to know what happens in France.

Now I know some of you were raised in the Facility so you're thinking "fly? Cock roach? Worm? Slow down!" Don't worry. I am going to explain them, the bugs. Here are some of the crunchy babies you can expect to see:

FLY

CLASSIC bug, some babies are born knowing about these depending on how much Pepsi their mom drank. They have a squat hairy body like a little Bob Hoskins but the head is not so handsome, like a lot of our bug colleagues they have compound eyes which are sort of like instead of having two very good eyes having two sets of a million shitty eyes, like they have a much better angle on everything but it's all in 144p. They also got this kind of suck tube mouth, I don't know if there are teeth in there and I don't want to find out. Flies famously love stuff that is stinky to us, especially turds. I guess a big old dog turd for them is full of so much stuff they can eat it's like if a piece of heaven fell down to Earth. I think they only live for a day or two so I'm glad they get to have such a special experience in that time.

BEE

We are so much nicer to bees than flies even though bees do suicide bombing and a fly would never even think of an idea like that. We are cool about bees because even though they are willing to kill themselves to give us a kind of wound that is considered a bit camp, they pollinate plants and make honey. Bees live in a thing called a hive that is sort of like a castle made out of barf and they all live for their queen who is like the one lady there I guess who gives birth to everybody, I don't know if when she dies one of them turns into the new queen or if she gives birth to a new queen and then gets eaten or what but bees love to have their jobs barfing a castle and making honey for their mom that they’re married to. Some people called beekeepers have figured out how to help bees with this by making special things for them that they can do hives on and in exchange we human people get to have the honey which seems like a fair trade. Out of all the animals we are eating stuff from bees are probably the most cool with it unless their beekeeper is like very cruel in the way they are keeping bees but they seem to be a largely gentle sort. I hope we can figure out a way to communicate telepathically with bees and let them know we've got good intentions toward them but that seems risky on a Madame Du Pompadour kind of basis where they use that psychic link to ingratiate us into the hive mind. Don't worry about that too much, most bees have very low psi ratings.

WASPS

These are bees' jack-off cousins from hell, they do all the same stuff with making big nests to live in with their mom wife but they don’t make honey or pollinate anything and they can sting you loads of times without dying. I feel like if a bee lands on you, you've got a solid chance at it flying away because it wants to go home and do bee stuff but wasps are much more like hey nice arm you got here…maybe I'm gonna do something maybe I ain't. I don't know if they do something nice for the ecosystem I'm just very ignorant about but I think even the Dalai Lama could be cool with seeing you kill a wasp. He wouldn't high five you but he'd get it.

LADYBUGS

THEY! ARE! CUTE! From afar they kind of look like Mickey Mouse with no head or arms or legs. They got red wings with black polka dots on them, huge whimsy factor to this bug plus they are named after girls for some reason and they might eat pests in your garden, there's a lot to be charmed by here! Unfortunately none of them have souls.

WORMS

Oh here is the spaghetti of the world. Worms are easy to think of as gross because they don't have a face and their version of doin it is getting cut in half, but they are also sort of dopey and innocent because they are just some tubes that want to wriggle around. It is not a lot to ask on their part! Their sentence for this dream is often death by bird. I don't know a lot about the minds of bugs but I hope they are too small to be able to process terror because if you are just some kind of little wriggling guy and a bird picks you up that's the most fucked you could possibly feel. I hope over their heads is just a thought bubble that says "worms" the whole time

SPIDERS

We love spiders! Spiders EXCITE US! They make these things called webs which are basically a huge sticky net that they live on but they're also an HH Holmes murder castle for flies. All they use to make webs is their buttholes and gumption and a pretty incredible grasp of the physical world. Most people couldn't make a spider's web with their hands and tools much less their anus. We are in awe of them! Spiders are considered a nice bug on account of they eat the bugs we don't like having around, but its not a formalized relationship like with beekeepers. Also some spiders do kill people with crazy poison but most of them are nice. If you ever have a problem where you are scared of poison spiders just put lots of lavender in your house, lavender is like plutonium to spiders.

COCKROACHES

You hate to see these skittering around. I'm not sure exactly why they're a problem? Maybe you can get sick off them if there's too many around? But even if you can't get sick seeing these is like a cartoon indicator that you are living in some squalor. Cockroaches are often spoken of as impressively resilient creatures who can survive nuclear bombs but also you can squash one with your foot. It's not great behavior to do that, but you can, and not to be mean but you are weaker than a nuclear bomb so what's the real story man.

BEETLES

Wouldn't it be nice to see a beetle! Beetles are an easy bug to like because I don't think they ever have poison or anything in them they just walk around wanting to eat a leaf and sometimes they have cool heads like stag beetles or rhinoceros beetle and you bet your life I had to look up what those are called in english because beetles are just way more a thing of Japan. I don't know if the average japanese person sees the same amount of beetles I do in an average year (absolutely no beetles) or if beetles are always toodling around their public parks looking for one eighth of one french fry to eat but japanese tv shows got a real pro-beetle bias. I used to follow a beetle named Spike on twitter who painted pictures with his head but now that he's dead from old age I can admit, I don't think he knew he was painting pictures. He looked proud in the pictures they posted but beetles might just be proud looking animals.

BUTTERFLIES

Congratulations to butterflies on being AUTOMATICALLY BEAUTIFUL! They live in a crazy way where first they are little crawling guys and then they get puberty or whatever and they enter a cocoon and their body totally transforms into this new winged thing. Butterfly wings can have all kinds of designs on them, I imagine they are meant to help ward off such as owls but they are basically big alive tattoos. Butterflies are a great bug to show kids, you don’t even gotta explain the thing where they do pokemon evolution first they see a butterfly and they’re on board.

MOSQUITOES

Okay so it is good to try and love every creature in the world but I don't know if mosquitoes are good or necessary. Their whole thing is they eat blood?  And because they are eating so many people's blood they spread diseases around? The best case scenario is you have a horrible bump that itches in a way that makes you go nuts and the worst case scenario is you are completely dead off this wretched bug? I don't know if there is an animal that eats mosquitoes and doesn't want to eat anything else but I think this might be one animal it might be okay to make extinct. Like we should at least have scientists look into it and maybe if we feel like it’s too evil to intentionally make them extinct we can make a dome on the moon as their sanctuary.

DRAGONFLIES

These are so fun to look at and think about, they have mostly kind of a more beautiful version of a fly's body but then much longer legs and a long tail and long beautiful wings and sometimes they are all iridescent? If dragonflies want some fruit from my house they can have it, babe.

FIREFLIES

A lot of bugs are beautiful but these are like straight-up magical? Basically they glow in the night time because of some kind of chemical inside them, and the glow kind of pulses in and out. I knew about these all my life and my attitude was ok whatever but then I actually had the experience of seeing them and reader it is about as special as being outside gets! More animals should glow, clearly if these guys are doing it glowing isn't harmful. Let's get some glow frogs going.

GRASSHOPPERS

They live for justice and they fight with tears in their eyes. Sometimes they make sounds with their legs to make it clear they are horny horny horny and if enough of them get hungry they turn into locusts from the bible. Their name comes from their wonderful jumping legs that allow them to be hopping all over the place, I bet some ancient guy learned some stuff about physics watching these. I think among people who eat bugs these are a fairly popular bug to eat so if you are having a bug eating party make sure to buy some.

PRAYING MANTIS

These are so funny because 1: triangle head, 2: their body naturally looks like they is scheming with their knife-hands all pressed together, and 3: dudes get their heads cut off after they bone. Praying mantises your whole life is a joke to me!

STINKBUG

Awful little guys who I guess evolved an okay defense mechanism of they smell really bad if you kill them. Technically that’s everybodys defense mechanism but for them it starts right way.

'PEDES

Whether it's Milli or Centi, these 'pedes have too many legs and I despise them! They're welcome to exist, I won't advocate for their total eradication like with mosquitoes, but there's no way they're doing anything good with that many legs! Don't turn your back on one of these!

MAGGOTS

These gross bugs love rotting meat so much that guys in 17th century times theorized that rotting meat spontaneously generated maggots. Like, smart guys who people respected. Sometimes you will see these on a dead animal and I guess inside a lot of coffins there are maggots happening, it's gross to look at them all wriggling around on something that died but I think any animal that exclusively eats animals that already died of something else is pretty polite by the standards of their community. Spiders, who we like, are doing terrifying shit to their neighbors while maggots just see what they can only perceive as a huge mountain of unattended meat and then act like they won the lottery, which they did. Good for them!

FRUITFLIES

The bugs are so small they just look like a Dot and they get really excited about fruit, not totally in a maggots on meat way but I do think they're a lot more enthusiastic about rotting fruit than we are for sure. When your life is like seven hours long you take your wins where you can get them.

SCORPION

OH FUCK!!!!! These are totally bad news! You never want to see these! They have a very famous tail full of poison, it's in parables and everything, Chakotay famously describes these guys as having it in their very nature to just sting whatever. I don't know if that is a prejudiced opinion, maybe there's a bug scientist somewhere who posts pictures of himself covered in scorpions to normalize scorpions but I think just to be safe if you see a scorpion go away from it. I don't think they are like, predators to where they are looking for a big old human to kill? They just got an ass that makes other stuff stop wiggling as far as they're concerned.

MOTHS

These are sort of like butterflies except they have to work for a living, their job is eating old shirts and flying out of poor peoples wallets in cartoons. Some moths are extraordinarily beautiful like the silk moth, which I once read doesn't have a working mouth so it doesn't eat or drink during it's life. That's incorrect right. There isn't an animal that is born hungry and thristy and dies that way too and lays eggs for more of the same, like the way energy works would not allow that to happen right. I need you to tell me that's not true. I need you to hold me and tell me that's not true. Anyways the biggest and most beautiful moth is obviously Mothra.

ANTS

These bugs all live together in tunnels underground, they do a similar thing to bees culturally where they got a hive mind and they're all married to their mom but unlike bees they don't make candy slime for us to eat. They do other stuff that's helpful but their lives are very grim and serious so they can't live in a candy castle. When I was a child living in Squalor there were usually ants everywhere as soon as it got warm and I grew to really hate them, which I recognize now is not their fault and they are trying to be alive same as anybody but when you are a child and you wake up covered in ants every day and there is always an ant trying to find something on you it can take back to it's momwife and they are all giving you little bites for what ever reason they do that, pure spite possibly, it's impossible to have a zen attitude towards them. You see TV shows with kids who live in the World on them and they'll get a present of an ant farm and you think how can life be so different there that those kids want ants?

Thank you for reading my big bug email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.

Love,

Ryland Duncan