In case it hasn’t been obvious, I wrote most of what you’ve been reading on this blog over last summer (before the semester started). Now that I’m in the middle of finals, I’m glad I did. Enjoy.

Musca Domestica. The common house fly.

Let me start by saying that I hate flies with the kind of deep hatred reserved for people that society would uniformly condemn. They will never disappear because they live on the refuse and detritus of all else in our world. They can survive the hottest summers and the coldest winters, radiation and poison.

Their brains are tiny but they are also brilliantly divided. Some brain matter is found in their actual heads, but the rest is in their legs and wings. Imagine that: a brain for each of your legs.

You can snatch one out of the air and hurl it against the wall with all of your might and it will merely bounce off, falling slowly, perhaps catching itself before hitting the floor and flying away. They are profoundly difficult to kill. I know because I kill them. I must kill all flies.

The flies that I hunt change a little with each generation. One generation is fat and slow, easily wiped out by any reasonable effort. The next generation, arriving in my house a week later, is fast, zooming into my door with a mosquito or two close behind while my daughter holds it open as she thinks about whether she’d like to join us outside.

It takes more time to kill all of them because they seem able to maneuver around whatever it is I have chosen to strike them down with. They fly close to and land on fragile or delicately balanced things like light bulbs on the ceiling and cats calmly clawing into my couch instead of helping. Both are acceptable collateral damage.

I develop the perfect combination: a bottle of cleaning spray in my left hand and a cardboard paper towel tube in my right. If I’m fast enough, I get the joy of that “thunk” when I knock one clean out of the air (which is the only way professionals should make the kill, by the way: in the air).

My duty done, corpses all about my feet that I must sweep up before my family wakes, I am satisfied. 0115 in the morning. I can still get some homework done. Of course there is always one more that I missed. It taunts me, zooming between me and my laptop screen. As fast as it comes, it vanishes into the blurry background from whence it came. It does this again and again, just to test my reflexes. It has misjudged me. Mistakes in this game are costly.

A week and countless door swings later and they are slow again. But now I am so attuned to lightening fast flies that I cannot hit these. I attack them, expecting them to detect my swing and take off, placing their tiny bodies in the path of oncoming doom. Instead they are too oblivious, slow, and stupid to be aware that it is coming until it has passed, at which time they casually fly away, unconcerned about my nearly as lethal back swing. I hurl profanities and my arsenal at them bodily as they lazily find a new purchase somewhere out of sight, utterly indifferent to me.

I will find them all in time. But they are reflex-testing adversaries. They are neither prey nor predator. Carion-eaters never are. Their world is the edge of our world. They are adaptable, fast reproducers, and challenging to kill. They are perfect. And they will be here for a very very long time. Unless I can kill them all.

My hat off to you, worthy foes.
-CG