Scream. F*ck. Die: A Bug’s Life!
If you are looking for someone to actually do their research to better inform you of the ecological role the Cicada plays here on Earth, you have come to the wrong place. If , however, you are looking for a moron who will use his base-level knowledge about these loud-ass-sumbitches to wax imbecilic on the subject - welcome home, my friends! Sit a spell, won’t ya?
At the time of writing this, my driveway is a temporary resting place for a throng of dead bugs. Ugly bugs. I’m not suggesting there is such thing as a pretty bug (though Ladybugs have quite the PR team!) but even as far as bugs go, cicadas are hard to look at. They look like beetles who put on a fly costume and tried to sneak in to a party at Club Horseshit!
Cicadas are fascinating to me for many reasons, but probably most of all is their ability to molt. I guess other bugs and animals molt, but they aren’t the ones currently screaming outside my house like Taylor Swift is inside, so I’ll stick to Cicadas.
For the uneducated reading this, “molting” is when a bug gets sick of its skin and Hulks out of it. Whether it is a form of self preservation, hygiene, or just advanced “bug-body dysmorphia” scientists don’t actually know (ok they do but like I said I ain’t looking it up)
The fact that they do this isn’t the impressive part. I’m sure if I had enough Percocets I could rip my own skin off for funsies. The impressive part is how impeccably intact their old skin is when they leave it behind! How do they do that? How do they waltz out of it all smooth like? Hell I can’t change my pajama pants without getting 3 types of mustard stains on them!
It took me longer than I care to admit to realize that that’s what was going on. For a large part of my childhood I thought that there were just light-brown-kinda-see-through-bugs that sat on our gutters all day long not doing shit. Like many things in my life, I learned the truth when I finally decided to flick one.
They say that Cicadas only come out every 7 years, and I’m no Bug Doctor but the math has to be wrong on that. The only explanation I can come up with is that large swaths of separate groups of Cicadas hibernate for 7 years, and we are always in a constant state of Bug-Flux. Cause if that’s not what’s happening, that means I’m 252 f*ckin years old and that can’t be right (it would explain my back pain though)
This is my Bug Doctor..Good guy!
I mentioned earlier that Cicadas scream, and when I say scream, y’all, they f*ckin SCREAM! I believe I likened it to Swifties getting emotional at the chance of glimpsing their Queen Taylor, but that’s honestly not a good analogy because those sound like screams of jubilation compared to the blood-curdling yelp of a Cicada that just rolled over for the first time in 7 years like Grandpa Joe when Charlie found that god damn Golden Ticket!
A Real “Bed Bug” am I right?
Its a scream you only hear on a few occasions: 1.) when watching someone get their leg amputated in a Civil War movie. 2.)when that lady fell out of that wine bucket while stomping grapes on the news. 3) from my son when my wife leaves the room for .05 seconds!
Hang this in The Louvre
Ironically though, if what I think I know about Cicadas is true, it IS a scream of great jubilation. For you see, dear readers, after nearly a decade in a Michael Jackson-esque hyper-sleep, the male Cicadas are about to get some well deserved Bug P*ssy!
This scream is some sort of mating call I reckon. I was gonna critique their approach until I remembered that, despite it not making much sense, being loud and obnoxious actually DID win me a fair amount of one-nighters back in my twenties. Of course I’ve got pinchable cheeks and an ass that won’t quit whereas Cicadas all look like the villains in a Ridley Scott film. Oh well, whatever blows your Bug-Skirt up!
So ugly he’s cute maybe?
Thankfully for me, I differ from Cicadas in at least one other way: I don’t fall over and die right after I have sex. I’m not saying that I won’t do that eventually, and lord knows it would sure beat choking to death on a Sour Patch kid (something that actually almost happened to me lol. Ask Trae Crowder) but so far, I’ve been able to remain alive after disappointing a woman!
This seems to be the entire life cycle of a Cicada. They scream, they f*ck, they die. So it goes.
It’s rather morbid to think about and also kind of depressing. An entire species’ life and purpose boiled down to one dismal sentence?
Then I realized if you added “cook dinner and watch a movie”, you’d pretty much have my existence in a nut shell. And you know what? It’s a wonderful life!
RIP Cicadas of 2024! When I see your cousins in 7 years, I’ll tell them that you died with honor (and a Bug-Boner)
Later, yall!
‘Corey
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I love your writing! Thank you for sharing it!!
To me, except for the crescendo and diminuendo (going louder and softer), cicadas always sounded like something being fried in really crackly grease.
I used to call cicada shells "bug ghosts."
Sleep, fuck, and die. Makes me think of Mennonites. (Except they work, fuck, and die.) Years ago, I helped typeset (from SCRATCH) an entire book dedicated to the history of dead Amish and Mennonites. ) Pages upon pages of people with the same names, the same number of children with the same names, and these same names would marry other same names... I was convinced that I was typing the same page over and over. Desperate to find something, anything interesting about this chore., I figured out that the reason the eleven or twelve children had the same middle initial was because traditionally, they were given the mother's maiden name as their middle name.
SO. I waited for someone named Abraham R. Martin to marry an Elizabeth Z. Martin and my patience was rewarded. A Martin married a Martin and yes! one of their children was named Martin Martin Martin. Or Martin cubed.
Sort of related -- there's something cruel about gardening with annual flowers. Annuals are meant to bloom, set seed, and die -- but you get a longer flowering time if you pinch off the faded blooms. Then the plant has to start all over again, bloom, try to set seed but O NO! It's the pinchy Sky Thumb & Index Finger! Curses!
And so, a successful flowerbed is just an array of extremely frustrated plants.
I hope you'all are not in the vicinity of vicious tornadoes.