Some bastard insect has bitten me. Some bastard insect has infected my
pure Aryan blood with its dirty poison. I'm beginning to swell
up. My ubermensch arm is becoming more and more deformed and
noticeable by the second. I have greeny yellow pus running
amongst my pure, beautiful, rope-like blood. This is the price I
pay for sitting outside in the sun, reading, sleeping, soaking up
the love that the sun is spewing out today, and for the next
couple of days. (You can see the love; just look into the sky at
midnight. I hope it works. Where else but in a doctor's surgery
can you actually see love?) I'm a generous and benevolent man
with delusions of grandeur (I used to be a god, but it turns out
I was just really bored); I'd happily give some of my blood to
insects. It maybe the terrorism syndrome: they only get what they
want after years of pain and violence, then they recant, and are
placed in the right. I wouldn't know; I'm no e(n)tymologist,
officially, but it's a fear nonetheless. I've never been one to
turn away a hungry man, and I've been around vegematarians long
enough to know insects are in no ways any different at all to me,
you, Cosmo and Dibbs. If an insect comes looking for my blood to
feed his wife and kids (or is that goats?), then I am not gonna
turn him away to go eat blood-substitute from the Hare Krishna
Blood Kitchens (© Atom Egoyan, Calendar). Perhaps I'm just too
nice. Perhaps I allow myself to be taken advantage of at all
sides by blood-sucking insects, but that's a little too
metaphorical for me; this, bitch, is reality.
I
realise that these insects inject me with their far-from-deadly
poison in order to spare my feelings, so I don't realise when
they are taking my blood, so they can save face that they have
fallen so far from their once mighty rôle as referee in the
Thora Hird Vs. Douglas Hurd jelly-wrestling contest, and so I can
maintain my glorious modesty at saving thousands of lives. I
realise all this (I realise it once again because the sentence
dragged on too long, and it's too late to care about doing
anything about it), but can't they think of me for once, and just
let me cope with the little prick of a mosquito's little prick,
instead of the huge allergic itching and swelling that I get? Why
hasn't insect evolution been geared specifically with me in mind?
By the time they change for me, I'll be long dead, or just
resting, and unable to cope with the wonderful beauty of millions
of insects all suckling from me in unison. I'd just stand, naked,
in the middle of a field, dosed up to the eyeballs on some mild
analgesic, pretending it was for their benefit, I'd close my
eyes, spread my arms, and the sky would appear to blacken as all
the insects swarmed to me to eat. But that day will never come,
because I can't fully offer myself up to the insect world if I'm
going to swell up, and itch for days.
Hell,
I'd leave a bowl of blood outside my door for the insects if it
wouldn't clot, trapping and killing them. ...Which returns me to
my fear of poison in my blood. If I were to bleed into a bowl, my
body would regenerate the blood, right? And when my blood gets
all old and wrinkly, my body regenerates more, right? But where
does the old wrinkly blood go? Cos I don't cry blood, I don't
shit or piss blood, I sure as cow shit on a goose don't sweat
blood (although I think I'd actually like to sweat blood once,
simply for the aesthetics of it), so where does the old blood go?
If the old blood doesn't actually go anywhere, and I've been lied
to by biologists my whole life, then where does the poison go
after I stop swelling? Is it just diluted amongst my blood? Are
mosquitoes gradually increasing the toxicity of my blood until
one day I just collapse, quivering, and sweating rancid pus
through my pores? It's an option, surely (DCMS), that must be
looked into. The danger is always there. The fear is always
there. Scratching, they say, makes it worse, but what if that's
the only thing that's keeping me alive? My fingernails dragging
the poison out of me. What if I die from lack of scratching? What
kind of epitaph is that? Here I lie, cos I didn't scratch. No,
let's spread the blame around. Here I lie because I didn't
scratch, biologists lied to me and insects didn't evolve with my
needs in mind. Fair's fair.