What The Buzz Is About
First published in the print column, Strictly Haresay
There’s precious little in this world that will get me out of bed faster than a buzzing fly in the bedroom.
A buzzing fly that lands on your lip, and you feel every spiky hair of every little leg, knowing full well those same feet, prior to treading across your mouth, have undoubtedly traipsed over many a manure pile, and most likely some mashed flat maggoty road kill somewhere—among other disgusting things.
I ask you: Is there any worse way to start the day?
My answer: Yes. Indeed there is.
What’s worse is to be repeatedly, incessantly, dive-bombed by one such diptera, until you finally whip back the covers and rise to stomp through the house looking for where you may have laid one of the seven fly swatters you own, because, yes, you hate flies that much, and in a moment of evil genius thought it would be brilliant to have a fly swatter in every room of the house so you would never have to go looking for one again when a particularly persistent fly wouldn’t leave you alone.
Like now.
Only in your pre-caffeinated state, with the perpetrator now dogging you from room to room—or maybe it’s his cohort, it’s hard to tell—you are practically blind with fury, making the effort of finding anything next to impossible, until the whole venture comes to an immediate, grinding halt as your bare foot lands just right on that errant piece of dry dog food that somehow ended up in the middle of the kitchen, and doubles you over like someone who got hit in the gut with a baseball traveling 90 mph. Because as anyone with kids and dogs can attest, the only thing worse than stepping barefoot on a stray piece of dry dog food is coming down on a lego, though both items possess top tier status for objects capable of inducing mind boggling pain in crazy disproportion to their size and true purpose.
Alas, even then, the aggravation is far from over.
As you sit, alone, in the middle of the kitchen, on the floor, rubbing the ball of your foot where there now exists a semi-permanent indentation in the perfect outline of a bone-shaped kibble, you realize all this is happening and it’s only 6:05 on this Sunday morning. The morning after you’ve stayed up until 2 AM the night before, working to meet a deadline.
And as you ponder your predicament, needing more sleep but sullenly assuming you’re probably up for the day now, you hear it.
The droning buzz.
Zig-zagging around the kitchen now, your enemy lazily circles the area over the sink where the smell of a slightly stinky drain has enticed him. So you rise up from the linoleum—slowly, nonchalantly, whistling lightly so as not to give yourself away as you casually (now with a slight limp) stroll from the room, playing it cool until the moment your foot has left the threshold of the kitchen, and you bolt for the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind you.
As you climb back into bed, snuggling into your warm spot and drawing the sheet over your shoulder, you smack your lips in anticipation of taking that headlong, delicious dive into early morning dead sleep.
Finally at peace, as you drift every-nearer toward dreamland, you sigh with sinister satisfaction and smile, triumphant in the knowledge that, despite sustaining a minor injury, you’ve managed to outsmart a creature with a brain the size of a poppy seed.
Until you hear…
NO!
