shit. The cicadas are here.
I wake up every morning to the deafening sound of millions of them, the collective chirping of the masses somehow worming its way through the screen, glass and curtains of my windows, through my room, under and around the ear plugs [and residual wax] and into my fucking brain. and of course this on a regular basis for the past few weeks is bound to stir up at least one anecdote of yore.
Insert random fact that I just learned: “cicada” comes from latin and means buzzer. So there you go. I learned that from wikipedia. Where, if the sound of the mass of them waking a person up every morning isn’t real enough, you can also find a sound clip. And the sped up molting of a “dog day” cicada in ohio.
So yes, I was reminded of another time when cicadas were taking over the world. the last time I recall them appearing in such startling numbers was in columbia, mo. I was then working my second ice cream/frozen yogurt job, at the tcby on 9th and cherry. I was just thinking how appropriate it would have been had the intersection been at 9th and locust, since people commonly [and mistakenly, I might add] refer to cicadas as locusts, which are actually more closely related to grasshoppers (again with the wikipedia), but I suppose that’s someone else’s pretty boring anecdote. Seems like there were a lot of them then, but they were much bolder than this year’s batch. So much so that you found them in your clothes and hair, swarming you when you left the relative safety of a building. On several occassions people managed to carry them into the yogurt shop in their clothes, unawares. And on fewer than several occassions, these creatures made their way into people’s ice cream. So that’s always fun.
But they were too big for anyone to actually ingest them. Not that that wasn’t possible, it just was impossible not to see something that large and alive moving in your food.
Nothing much more on that subject. It just reminded me of white chocolate mousse and watermelon sorbet mixed together, sans insects. Oh, and sucking the gas out of the whipped cream in the walk-in cooler. That was a lot of ruined cream.
In the vein of random, i’m going to take this space to share another anecdote. Completely unrelated to cicadas, but relating to china, so that’s enough. About 5 months ago another teacher and I helped the school district with some recordings for middle school tests in the province. So we went to this expensive studio and wore headphones and read very slowly from a script into fancy microphones.
But before any of that happened there was a commotion. We were waiting for our escort to the studio at some big warehousey type place. So while we were waiting we wandered. on the 3rd floor there were lots of road cases, the kind that touring bands use to lug all their shit around, and men moving them.
We went downstairs and waited some more. While we were waiting a man ran down the stairs and out the doors, clutching his hand to his chest while blood ran through his fingers and down his shirt.
A few minutes later another man came down the stairs. He wasn’t running and showed no outward signs of being in a hurry. He was holding essentially a woman’s handkerchief. And in the handkerchief was a man’s finger. Presumably belonging to the man who had run down the stairs a moment prior.
Finally another group of people made their way down the stairs. Then everyone squeezed into a car, clown style, and drove away. So it was an interesting scene before we got to the actual recording. We figured it had been one of the men moving the road cases around, with the top of the case shutting on his finger and severing it.
And finally, from bad to worse….another pretty gruesome nugglet that affected me secondhand. I have a roommate now. not a british dude, but an american chick. Pretty chill. From colorado. Anyhoo, she’s been here for about a month give or take a few days. I found her on Sunday in the bathroom sobbing. Sobbing and shaking. So I hugged her awkwardly—I’m not necessarily very good at comcforting people. Sat her down on the couch to get to the bottom of all this shock.
She started by saying “I just saw the most fucked-up thing.” She had been biking home on our street when she heard a loud “thud.” a guy, maybe in his mid-20s, had just fallen or jumped out of his high rise apartment building and landed on the sidewalk next to her. She was the first person to see it, besides the hairdresser whose shop he landed in front of.
She got off her bike. Walked over to the guy, whose limbs were all contorted and bloody. There were bits of blood and viscera scattered around him. a crowd started to gather and no one appeared to be doing anything. Her sister’s a nurse back in colorado, so she’d actually been cpr trained. So she took his pulse but there was nothing. Then she left him to the curiousity of the chinese crowd as the ambulance approached.
I didn’t really know how to comfort her so I opted to open a beer.
