deep into his bugs

when you have bed bugs, all you really want to talk about are bed bugs. and because bed bugs take over your life, your stories of bed bugs will be among the best ones you ever tell. to tell a great story, it helps a great deal to live it first. when you're invested in your point of view, especially in times of infestation, it comes across.

though after say, a wedding, or an apres work drink with colleagues, you might reconsider these riveting, intense descriptions of having bedbugs. 'highways of bites' along your legs, 'crouching underpanted' in your bed with a flashlight and tweezers, 14 days of 'sleepless, muderous' nights...

i'd guess that if you were a bed bug you'd see things totally differently. you're not worried about any of these insanities. you're just trying to get fed. your life is totally crawl-suck-die. the question is, what about a bed bug that one day develops some appreciation for the fact that all he'll ever be is a bed bug?

It's not impossible. Plenty of people i know freak out about halfway through their lives. It's like one day they shoot awake and look around and think: what the hell am i doing here? there are certain roles right? science is constantly revealing castes, formulas and molecular imperatives for evergrowing lists of lifeforms and spaces (to think humans are excluded is fooling yourself). and still we seem to need to agree, no matter what science proves, that no one knows what it's really like to be you.

when you think about it, whose story is more interesting? a lentil-flavoured, middle-aged man, infested by bed bugs, alienated from a wedding party? or a wingless, middle-aged bed bug, the product of traumatic insemination. who suddenly comes to an DDT-induced, crushing self-realization? crawl-suck-die? brutal.once a bed bug, always a bed bug. design imperatives. Cimicidae Schopenhaur.

i guess it's not a competition.