Mosquitoes Big as Canned Hams

I’m terrified of bees. If there’s a bee within five yards of me and I am aware of it, I freak out like a tiny female child. When people see this, they usually have one of two reactions. They either assume that I am deathly allergic to bee stings and it is a matter of life and death if one is near me, or they just think I’m a pussy.

The truth is that when I was a small child, I watched as my mother was carried away by a giant bee. Not only that, but right afterwards, I got stung on the leg by a bee and it hurt like a sonovabitch. Really! Have you ever been stung? It sucks!

Popular culture is obsessed with how disgusting, creepy and weird insects are. Remember the flies in the Ring movies? How about the moths in Mama? Miniature monsters, some no bigger than a fingernail, covered with their crispy exoskeleton, crawling on, flying around, biting and annoying anything larger than they are.

Video games, like the fallout series, which takes place in a post apocalyptic world makes you fight giant bees and scorpions, mutated into raccoon-sized pests. The first two Bioshock titles gave the player the ability to drink a special drug and control a swarm of bees, sending them to sting and bite their enemies, distracting or killing them.

A few years after the disappearance of my mother I went on a camping trip with my father and a few friends in Missouri. The thought of mosquitoes as big as canned hams is more than a joke there. The bugs are fucking big, they wouldn't be able to comfortably land on you to feast. Each time they bite, it seems like they take a pint of blood, so three or four pricks and you could be a goner.

Bugs aren't just simple annoyances though, swarms of locusts can destroy a whole state’s worth of crops in a week. Enough termites and your house just might come crashing down around you. One tiny bug brought in on a boat from another country could cause havoc as far as crops and foliage is concerned. No wonder so many products are designed to rid our lives of these horrors.

I recall another lovely anecdote from my childhood that I bring you now. When I was young, I watched a movie where a giant spider destroys a town. The great thing about the movie was that you could clearly see the cart under the body that moved the spider ad the gears that made the legs move up and down. It was hilarious. It makes me think about how hard it is to represent such a reprehensible creature on film. Either bad computer generated graphics, bad makeup, bad delivery, something is always wrong with bugs in movies. Maybe it’s just because nothing i more horrible to us as the real terror that is insects.