Rain

It's raining in Temple, and I'm waiting for negatives to scan. Sometimes I wish it would storm every night in Central Texas, soft as the drops fall against the staccato thunder. Then I realize that nightly storms would probably only breed more of the Black Death, or as you know them, crickets. The dumb black beasts would worm their way from under every bush and out of every gutter, lodging their pestilence in the humble nooks and crannies of our warm hearths. Or, as it were, our dentist's office, where yesterday I was serenaded by a lustful little ogre, who coveted the black smudge on my New Balance. His screeching emanated from a floorboard near the cupboard and sounded insatiable. I did not seek to crush him, for he was apparently immune to x-ray radiation.

Given that I have just read a New Yorker article that made reference to an Amazonian leech some 18 inches long, which fed with a 6-inch "probiscus" — in layman's terms, "blood-sucking ice pick" — I wonder if the rain forest would also produce giant crickets. Why, what if the combination of nightly, nourishing rainfall, coupled with repeated doses of gamma rays led to a mutant race of monstrous , "Texas sized" crickets, as large as locomotives, whose fastly undulating wings could level entire buildings? Would they puree men alive within their wings as they made bloody music, lapping up the remains? And would we fight them with giant pairs of tongs, with which to pull off their legs? Or could we just divert them into a canyon, where they would hop off the walls and each other until falling dead by the dozens, as they did in the walkway to my office?

What the — I intended to post about how much I hated film and couldn't wait to pick up my new digital camera this weekend. Anyways, I do not like crickets.