South in Ya Mouth (part 3)

We spent the last few days of our vacation with our dear friends JC & KB (and my new buddy Charlie!) on the outskirts of Memphis. They got a pretty cool living situation down there: a little gated community (I incorrectly referred to it as a "hamlet") with a nice pool and a BBQable deck. Plus every store and food option under the sun within a song's drive. We had a great time. Oh yeah, big thanks for the bag of pretzel nuggets and awesome cookies, which were all eaten.

My bug bite problems continued, however. Driving over to Corky's BBQ I was cluster stung by mosquitoes (or maybe a single mosquito?) on my left and right knees. I also discovered a double bite on my left wrist, which looks a lot like some of the "fang" style spider bites I read about on line. I really don't think I was bit by a black widow spider, but if you don't see any posts for two weeks, you might want to look into my situation.

We were ready to leave this morning by 6:00 to catch our 8:24 departure for LGA. Too bad we were in the middle of an insane electrical storm. Like, Donna fucking Deluge level. We said fuckit and jumped into the car at exactly 6:30am. LJ got about 40% soaked in our five-second dash to the car, Mz about 70%, and I weighed in at around 95%. We were ready to come home.

The drive to the airport was harrowing. I clutched the wheel white-knuckle style and stared out the windshield like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. It didn't help that every damn road was called Walnut Hill or Walnut Shrove or Walnut whatever (I muttered "walnut brains" as we drove off at 6:31). We missed the turn-off for rental returns, as I'm sure thousands before us have, and pulled in to Avis relatively on time. We had some help moving our shit into the shuttle bus and shuttled away.

We got to Memphis Int'l in a full-on downpour. Mz handled LJ as I "handled" our bags and his enormous carseat. The driver grabbed a few of our things and put them near a wall where they'd be "drier". Drier than what? Underwater? I dragged three soaked bags, a plastic suitcase, a chair and my own sorry ass into the airport.

My socks and sneakers were completely soaked, and I was freezing my ass off. We got on line for the dumb-ass kiosks and got checked in, avoiding small talk with an idiot on line behind us ("you guys got wet, huh?") All told, we made it on the plane OK.

Our luck was about to change for the better. We sat in the front row of the regular class (bulkhead?) with lots of room in front of us. The seat next to us was a no-show, so we had plenty of room for LJ to cavort and wiggle around. Mz actually got to sneak in a rare nap while me and the boy watched a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD on our laptop (with George Carlin narrating!). It was the best flight we ever had with Jr, even though we were starving and freezing our shunts off. The guy in first class in front of us said he was the best behaved kid he'd ever seen on a plane. I thanked him and got as far away from the guy as possible.

Pretty smooth getting back from LGA too. A fair-to-middling cab driver (one of those 126th St types) did a fair-to-middling job and we made it home in one piece. My wife whisked the boy to safety as I dealt with the family of luggage one last time. He got a fair-to-middling tip.

I humped the shit up to the apartment and walked right into a horrified looking Mz outside the elevator. I feared the worst-- did water leak in through the A/C and destroy my Bronx is Burning DVD box set?

"There are swarms of giant flies in the living room," my wife reported. "They might be in some other rooms, too."

I secretly chuckled. This is the kind of "problem" we love to face coming home from vacation. I grabbed a couple of junk-zines from the mail pile and asked, "Is that it?" out of the side of my mouth (I would shriek in terror about 10 minutes later when I discovered we were out of Diet Mountain Dew, but at this point I was feeling pretty solid).

Maybe I was still creeped out by my bug troubles down south, but I had a rougher time with these giant flies than I'd like to admit. I quickly killed about three with a Crate & Barrel catalog, and then realized that opening the living room window might be a better, kinder solution. I opened the window and was promptly met with a gust of sand-wind in the face. They're blasting the facade next door! That's what those guys are doing out there!

I left a few fly corpses out on the floor (these things are seriously fucking big!) to serve as warnings to the rest of the offenders. I would've mounted their heads on toothpicks and arranged them on the couch, but I just didn't have that kind of energy. Plus, the survivors seemed emboldened by the deaths of their comrades and were re-organizing in the kitchen. Pretty soon I was hacking away like a crazed lunatic, swinging at anything that moved. The bloodlust was so overpowering that I took a swat at an innocent USB flash drive on my desk and nearly fainted. Check out the bloodstained circular flyer pictured at right.

I bailed out and settled on the "trap them between the outside and inside windows and let them fly around for two days until they die" strategy that we usually reserve for more dangerous critters like wasps and hungover house guests. I knew we should've kept those darn cats of ours.