윤

Used to be SoCal was a haven for those of us with a history of mosquito saliva intolerance, but seems we have the Chinese to thank again for an end to that. (Alright, globalization, climate change, whatever.) Still, for all our vaunted advances, we’re no less at their mercy: one fucker ambushed me in the car footwell this afternoon and the viral load was so overwhelming I had to stop and get out. Lucky for me I had just vacuumed the carpet so it was easy to spot and drunk on my range-exceeding blood that vengeance could be exacted, and while I’m no longer susceptible to the kind of hideous swelling I experienced until college or the kind of bubbling that might be even worse en masse, I’d like to think we’re not too far from developing dragonfly-sized drones to dogfight them.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday, which brought out the crickets. One must’ve come up with a new strategy during the winter, that is to perch himself as high as possible and broadcast his mating call to a wider audience. And thus it chose the second floor windowsill above our bed, and at midnight to begin his song. Tapping the glass would stop it for a minute, and opening then shutting the small sliding pane maybe twice that, but always just longer than it’d take to lie back down.

I imagined him to be an angel come to give final instructions to Xavier (in which case he’d better not be the sort to have fallen there), maybe even a warning about the world. If so I’ll have to argue my case later because I was soon violently yanking on the screen to get to him, and when I got it dislodged enough to squeeze my hand through, whipping a tape measure in its direction. He would taunt me in the worst imaginable way, by allowing me to extend my sense of accomplishment before resuming. I forfeited an hour later, and slept through the 4.4 quake at 4:04am.

Somehow this is a bug I don’t want to crush. Or, as is the case with mosquitoes, allow to merge into one giant super-monster that can be nuked once and for all. Wikipedia says its curiously anthropomorphic behavior

is highly unusual for an insect species. The males and females form some kind of a bond. The males follow the females and their activities depend on what the female is doing. During the night the couple sleeps together with three of the male’s legs wrapped around the female.

Have had a hankerin’ for chocolate-sprinkled vanilla ice cream since reminiscing about Newport Creamery, but dessert being excised from my regiment months would pass before I got ’round to satiating it. 老婆’s coupon was inexplicably good only in another town over, so the unsubsidized three scoops of their “lite” (read: tasteless) flavor and extra topping, whose appeal must be in simulating Milhouse’s ants-crawling-in-mouth moment: $7.20. My orange juice at IHoP Saturday, $2.99, and I got free refills; for the same price I might’ve bought a gallon at the supermarket, too, but the premium is better justified by the environment or occasion. And in my lifetime I have not watched the price of restaurant beverages skyrocket like they have here, gas stations or movie theaters.

A fly I’d been chasing all day suddenly landed on the desk in front of us while we were discussing what was on the monitor and waited there for 老婆 to pick up a magazine and turn it into 2-D …that’s another self-reference. And here’s one more: I’d mistaken the title of the Korean movie 추격자, which I should get to shortly, from IMDb’s romanization of “Chugyeogja” to be 죽이자.

Thanks to the cliff-hanging driving in Indiana Jones 4 (which, alas, like the rest of the movie, was spectacularly tepid—they managed to follow the formula well enough, suspension-of-belief escapes, swarming insects, bad guys vaporizing at the end, but maybe all that proved is that formula just doesn’t work anymore) I dreamed of getting onto an on-ramp high above the water, then, as so often happens, the perspective changed to outside the car, like in a videogame whose critics complain about stiff camera angles, and I lost control and ran off a portion without guard railing. I watched from my overhead perch and saw it dive into the ocean, then flew to another side of the bridge where a school of dolphins had gathered. Swooping down to join them, I found myself in an underwater station that teleports its passengers to Alpha Centauri. A bright light shimmered around me, and I soon stepped out onto the deck of a vessel near the alien city. The plain but densely-packed buildings didn’t particularly impress as other-worldly, so I looked up to the night sky for passing star-liners.

After landing I was ushered into a crowded theater lobby, accompanied by many visitors from Earth. My old buddy Reynold was there, asking someone about an engineering problem he was having with a surging circuit, but the response was a snicker, because, as everyone apparently knew, you shouldn’t expect any benefits from advanced civilizations. Another rule in effect was that everything of value had none and vice versa, so when I went to a nearby shop to have rips and creases in a poster I was carrying repaired (which was possible with their technology, by first marking the damaged areas with stitching), and the one I thought was from the Shining turned out to be a B-movie called “Shining Monsters” instead, I offered it to the proprietor for another I’d rather have. Might as well barter my credit away, since there’s no use in keeping currency.

There were corn-shaped egg sacs burst open on the walls, an embarrassing overlook of sanitation. Bright yellow stains surrounded them, and I could only imagine what sprang forth.

Then I swore my eyes were open, but I could alternate with those in my mind; in the dream they beheld, I held a small ironing board, maybe the counter-top kind, in my left arm, and from my lying position I had to raise it into view. My waking hand would be clenched but empty, yet I could see its contents “inside”. Had I dreamed this whole experiment, too?

Obama out-Nielsens Beijing’s opening ceremony, and the Republicans answer with a 三八 running mate to pick up the leftovers… real life isn’t looking too different from the crazy shit you see in the movies. Could use some more dinosaur-sized monsters (and not the animatronic kind—read: turn on a single joint—that spit water at you on the Jurassic Park ride; talk about lazy, the last sprinkler that got me they didn’t even bother stuffing inside a velociraptor and just hid it behind a bush).