Nothing is written except in stone, blood, the stars, and all over your face
Yellowjackets, a type of predatory social wasp, are called “meat bees” by irresponsible dilettantes and mean-spirited bloggers. Autumn in Minnesota summons mobs of meat bees from their colonies in tree stumps and hollow logs, rousing them to forage for sugar and other carbs in caches of fallen fruit and/or garbage with the goal to nourish next-generation queens.
On this shimmery September Saturday, Chris Lux Hayes is navigating the great room of his house when he notices a meat bee skittering against the glass of the room’s eastward picture window. The insect is flummoxed by the invisible barrier.
“You can use that scented candle jar on the sill to capture that wasp and then release her outdoors,” his wife, Ginny, points out, gesturing absently.
“How do you know this wasp is a she?” Hayes asks.
“All yellowjacket workers are female,” Ginny replies. “Males self-destruct shortly after fertilizing the queen.”
“Jesus creepers,” Hayes grunts before moving to size up the candle jar.
As it happens, Ginny is monitoring household events from one end of a leather sofa recliner. Her eyes are aimed at the screen of the great room’s flat panel TV, which is tuned to CNN This Morning Weekend.
Ginny has just learned that Hemi Hicksmith, the mayor of Dover, Delaware, is not a real person, but actually a deepfake personality created by Shockpuppet, the North Korea-based, deep-generative technology leviathan. Evidently, Mayor Hicksmith was elected more than two years ago. Ginny is trying to listen to the report and wishes her husband would pipe down.
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
— Omar Khayyám
The picture window is flanked by two sliding windows with screens. The windows are open, but not the screens. Hayes thinks ahead and opens one of the screens before picking up the scented candle jar and removing its lid.
I can trap the yellowjacket inside this jar by using the window pane as a kind of force field, Hayes calculates, his lips keeping pace with his thoughts. Then I’ll wait until she strays deeper into the jar before swooping in with the lid to seal her inside.
“I’ll then hold the jar out the window and remove the lid,” Hayes tells his wife. “The yellowjacket will fly away—and she’ll be free again, you know, like Joan of Arc and/or Mata Hari.”
“You are the immortal god hero of the American experiment,” Ginny mutters and turns up the volume on the TV.
Hayes accomplishes his objective with unexpected precision. He feels colossally pleased with himself.
Contextual interlude…
T.E. Lawrence returned from the grave in 1962 to operate a war camel in the sandy-screen saga, Lawrence of Arabia. One twisty storyline in the film, which scarfed up seven Oscars, involves the douchey trooper, Gasmin, who falls off his own camel during a festive trek across the Sun’s Anvil.
Lawrence wants to delay his raid on an enemy port by going back to rescue Gasmin, a fussy-ass scheme that risks the lives of all the actors.
“Fuck that noise, English,” objects Sherif Ali, a fictional composite of multiple Arab thought leaders played by Doctor Yuri Zhivago. “Gasmin is chipped beef on burnt toast.”
Lawrence ignores Sherif Ali and 1,400 years of Islamic email alerts. He braves exhaustion, dehydration, dust cyclones, and spice-hoarding sandworms to save Gasmin, who later murders a hostile clod from a rival tribe during a routine spat.
Lucky for all involved, Lawrence is swiftly elected as Gasmin’s judge, jury, and executioner.
“You hideous ingrate,” the Englishman refuses to say as he empties his six-shot revolver into Gasmin’s unhappy body.
“Well, that’s the straw that crushed the camel’s head,” Sherif Ali chuckles under his breath.
Later that afternoon…
Hayes and Ginny are outside transplanting hostas in a new section of Ginny’s Fairy Garden. Gin is drinking a lowball beverage—E&J Brandy VSOP Grand Blue and Coke Zero, but her hands are occupied at the moment by a pointy-headed shovel in digging mode.
Meanwhile, Hayes is peering anxiously into the maw of his Skeggox’s Monkey, a cocktail he triumphantly invented years earlier by combining one storm surge of Reyka vodka, one cloudburst of Baileys Irish Cream, and one flash flood of Kahlúa.
“Fuck, a yellowjacket fell in my drink and drowned,” he informs his wife.
“What?”
“No way this can be the same yellowjacket.”
“No way,” Ginny agrees, looking sad and perplexed.
Hayes makes a weird face before marching down to Crazy’s Garden to pour his drink at the base of a purple clematis climbing the property’s black-link fence. He imagines the yellowjacket corpse will eventually decay, allowing the insect’s soul to merge with the perennial’s roots and be free again, you know, like Joan of Arc and/or Mata Hari.
Sure, why not? Hayes reckons and wanders off to make a fresh Skeggox’s Monkey.
Crikey note on the Skeggox’s Monkey: The author learned later in life about a cocktail called the Mudslide, which was supposedly concocted by pirates at a haunted tavern in the Cayman Islands in the 1950s.
Was the author’s bygone giant schnauzer, Skeggox, present at this obviously apocryphal event? Of course not, Skeggs wasn’t even born yet. And anybody with a minor in zoology knows monkeys do not inhabit the Cayman Islands.
Those two discrepancies alone rule out the existence of any cocktail called the Mudslide, proving once again that the Skeggox’s Monkey is the one, true, American-made beverage of its kind. 🐒
Learn even less about meat bees, brandy, vodka, fairy gardens, Skeggox, the Sun’s Anvil, and other stuff by contacting:
Crikey
Goon Quoll
Keynote Character in Moonbow
Contact Form
Excerpt from BUDDHA REX
Pancakes Sound Good
Wullem “Wum” Wight was the archetype of the present-minded professor. He had the air of a born tycoon, alert, composed, hale, and aloof. People said he was handsome like Peter O’Toole with a pinch of Eastwood, a kind of Dirty Harry of Arabia.
He diddled his teaching assistants, both male and female, with brisk professionalism, first bowling them over with his almost unearthly astuteness, then hypnotizing their genitals with an irresistible sangfroid.
His latest takeovers on the Avignon campus were Something-or-Other Shunt, a bouncy, snot-blooded stunner with delicious skin, four brain cells, and a sock monkey tattoo on the back of her neck, and Cash Blah-Blah-Blah, a chipper, shark-eyed twinkus with small hands, hippie hair, and a giraffe-shaped birthmark on his thigh.
He took them both at once in an evening jazzed by Caribbean rum (not Pyrat Cask 1623; he saved that for himself), Barney Rubble hash, and Elly May. They were still in his bed when he left the house after realizing he had forgotten his laptop on campus.
He lived only two miles from the college in a rented Craftsman in the plushest neighborhood in Lazy Eye. The night was lovely, the air alive with elfish, woodsy smells, the stars glittering intimately as if just minutes away and not billions of bloody light-years in the past.
He parked his leased Audi R8 Spyder in the Parvin Hall parking lot and considered getting some air before heading for his guest office, a dank cubbyhole in an equally shitty office row packed with peckerheads and goofs disguised as deep-headed faculty.
What am I doing in this liberal arts wasteland? he wondered. Ugh, my little toe aches. The Swarthmore of Minnesota, right. Might as well banish me to the best college in Juárez or Port Moresby. Do you really think those fish dicks on Europa are going to flesh out as exobiologicals? Are you asking me? What kind of name is Shunt?
Wum poked a stick of sugar-free gum in his mouth. Spearmint helped quash the sinister tastes that occasionally fumed and bristled on his tongue. He had donned his trusty denim blazer with tee and khakis. His Brit pop hairdo marked him as neat yet tousled. His spick-and-span stubble showed how he was all but ready to live on edge.
Yes, I could go for a walk, he thought. My eye is twitching again. I could go pee by that tree. I am a professor, by Jove.
He crossed a sidewalk and stepped on the lawn surrounding Parvin Hall. He thought he heard bats squeaking at some nameless altitude. Minnesota had, what, six kinds of bats? Wum liked knowing he could summon aimless facts.
He also knew Borneo sheltered walking sticks, aka phasmids or ghost insects, that were nearly two feet long. Phasmid was a far-out word. A word like that could be used to name a superpowerful insectile race on any given Earth analog.
Phasmid hooligans raped our women, giving them unspeakable orgasms. Yeah, and a shunt is some sort of medical doodad. Drains gunk from waterhead babies. Used for other devious diseases as well, all hideous. People my age are ripe for such invasions. People my age are low-hanging fruit for any old cock-smacking nastiness. The Shunts of Long Island. Old money from the Netherlands, Belgians probably, every last one a ball-peen nebbish.
Wum stood still and spit out his gum. Dick-listening Sapientologists, ruining science. Why can’t the public understand? Maybe I shouldn’t have a totem animal. I’m a systemized mind giant. You won’t find a tiger snake or Bengal tiger with a totem scientist. How many misanthropic astrobiologists reside in the black smokers of the Atlantic? Don’t answer that.
Why couldn’t I be a whale-sized aquatic fox discovered by a NASA cryobot in the oceans of Jupiter’s sweetest moon? I loved foxes as a kid. I studied their habits and knew only twelve rang true. Their dens are called earths. They high pounce. They’re dogs, bwah-ha-ha, and run in skulks. Reds occupy five continents.
I didn’t grow up wishing to be a semi-sociopathic, textbook has-been. All I ever wanted to be was a fox, a red fox, living with my family in the woods. Pancakes sound good. And a blunt, one sealed with blueberry honey and packed with Silver Haze and crack.
