At a BBQ early today somebody brought Nickel Nips. Do you know what Nickel Nips are? Even if you think you don’t, yes, you do.
Remember these little guys from your sweet tooth teething childhoods?
Anyways, I twisted two together and put them in a tree, because… that’s just the sort of stuff you do in Williamsburg.
I tweeted the photo and said the first person to identify what these objects were would to win a prize.
@TheeJoelle was quick to the draw in identifying them and I told her I would write about whatever she wanted. She chose mosquitoes. Because… who knows her motivations?
I’ll admit though, some of this ballad I hijacked from napkin scrawls in Kenya, where I thought about mosquitoes an awful lot.
The Ballad of The Mosquito and the House Fly
House flies are the golden retrievers of the insect world. When you walk home with your pours secreting the scent of their sensual dreams, they rush from some covert corner, eager and enthused—just happy to see you—wondering what kept you so long, their flight a spiral of joy, their landing direct. If shaken off they will return straightaway, not questioning the irritated emotion of your hand that they know would never intentionally bruise them. House flies love everything about you—your unwashed hair, the scent you carried from the morning muffins—all of this cries for elation from their every sensory organ.
Mosquitoes do not greet you when you walk inside from a sunny day. They wait at the edges of life until the moon nods a larcenous grin in their direction. “I won’t tell,” he says. They take blood from you but are not thankful knowing that you use it for the most infantile of assignments, like mowing the lawn, while they use it to create life.
Houseflies always feel at home. They live in a buzzing world of all-you-can-drink taverns, where the manager always comps your tab and everyone’s name is Yummy.
Mosquitoes are cats that grew from kittens who didn’t play like the other kittens, whose bites were not playful, whose scratches consistently cut to deep.“We’re kittens for Christ sake!” The other young cats meowed, ashamed at such diabolical kitten games.
Mosquitoes are the cats that openly resent being placed in your lap, who kick the litter onto the carpet, who hate children.
Houseflies are like flying high-fives, a finally delivered greeting practiced for hours in the walk of the mind.
Is it then, some divine irony of celestial glee that while Jake had a fly problem, Juliet had a mosquito problem? When she had killed a great many of them she came as close as to nirvana as a mosquito murderer gets. Jake tolerated the flies and imaged they were his deceased relatives coming to say, “Whassup?”
