IT’S GNAT FUNNY!
Ó Copyright October 2012 by Philip Birmingham. All rights reserved.
I went to the landfill recently with my garbage and trash. It was a beautiful fall day, with the leaves turning colors under a beautiful sunny day. Life is good! A few miles down the road, something in the van flew past my eyes, and then flew to the rear area of the car. Since I am at an advanced age now and feeble, and have diabetic retinopathy, coupled with very poor hearing, it could have easily been an F–16 fighter jet for all I knew.
It flew by again, and I caught a glimpse of a small black gnat. A minute or two went by, and then he flew by again. This time, I tried the karate kid snatch and grab maneuver with my right hand, which I tried several times but didn't catch him, nor has that maneuver ever worked for me for any time in the past 79 years of my life. I tried several more times with no success.
My skull apparently has some gravitational pull, as he then went into orbit around my head. I remained still and calm, until he fell into my trap by landing on the windshield. I backhanded a blow with my right hand, whacking the windshield here and there repeatedly, hurting my fingers, while he skipped back and forth on the windshield and maneuvered himself just out of reach. He finally left the windshield and went back into orbit around my head.
Now I was angry, so I picked up a small writing pad from my console and repeatedly swatted at him as I expertly drifted in and out of the left and right lanes. During one of his orbits, I swung at him, hitting myself in the forehead with the pad. I was fully in the left lane by then and pulled back to the right as a car went by, causing a Doppler effect with horn blaring. I pictured the headlines in the Post–Star the next day: "On Ridge road yesterday there was a fatal car crash, in which an old man and a gnat were fatally injured."
I decided to pull over the shoulder of the road, and put my blinker lights on. The gnat was nowhere to be seen. I then decided to lower the left window and simply let him fly out. It didn't work, nor has it ever worked in 79 years. I finally closed the window and continued on to the landfill with the orbiting gnat. I entered and pulled up to the garbage receptacle. A brilliant idea then occurred to me. I left the driver side window open while I emptied my trash cans. The idea was that the gnat would smell all that wonderful garbage, and eventually simply fly out the window.
When I finished I put the trash cans in the back of the van, got behind the wheel, and drove away as I closed the window. I smirked, thinking that I, as Homo-sapiens (wise man), with a several pound brain, had outwitted a gnat, with a subatomic particle-sized brain, using pure logic and common sense. About a mile later something flew by my peripheral vision, which turned out to be the gnat, closely followed by a yellow jacket wasp and an unidentified soft black bug with wiggly feelers. All, of course, went into orbit.
It was time to apply the laws of physics. I opened the driver side window and increased my speed to 60 mph, which would suck them all out of the van, and hopefully into oblivion. It didn't work, nor had it ever worked in 79 years. Most notably, the yellow jacket managed to hold on against the smooth inside windshield glass, as his body fluttered against the air pressure! I grabbed my small writing pad and began whacking at them as they all went into orbit and flew off in different directions.
I finally scored with a lucky direct hit on the yellow jacket, making a mess on the windshield. Damn those cars and their horns in the opposing lane! Various attempts and lane changes with blaring horns ensued for the rest of the ride home. I finally pulled into the garage and turned the van off. I used a Kleenex to wipe up the yellow jacket guts as the soft black bug flew by my vision, and into the rear of the van, where I assume he will spend the winter snuggled under a tarp, or in some throw pillows, and the way my luck was running, it would be a breeding female. As I slid out of the van on the driver side, the gnat flew by my head and into the garage, and disappeared. I hope to find his corpse next spring. My life sucks!
