I make it a habit not to upload images to this blog. It’s too much work.
Nothing, however, should be spared in the fight against the Evil Ones.
I am writing this at 2.23 am, by now awake for nearly half an hour and likely to remain awake for a good few hours more.
The reason is shown in the image. More than that, there were two of them that somehow got under the mosquito netting. Once they had been dispatched to what I hope is a special kind of hell (it’s relatively easy and hugely enjoyable to kill them inside the netting), I was left wide awake, and itching, after only 3 hours sleep.
What are these beings? What manner of evil are they? Snakes, spiders, scorpions and all kinds of potentially dangerous creatures run and hide when they see us or feel the vibration of our footsteps. Or at least they try to, and only when cornered and in fear of their lives might they lash out and bite or sting us. Wasps and bees only sting if we swat at them, and though a tiger or crocodile might be happy to see us, at least they have the decency and a sporting sense of fair game to be very large and rather difficult to miss.
Though mosquitoes are near invisible, almost silent (unless buzzing your ear) and can magically disappear into thin air once you do spot them, they alone stand out as utterly hateful among all flying and creeping things, all ferocious beasts of the field, and all blood curdling monsters of the deep. To mosquitoes we are not an occasional opportunity, a meal that happens to stray into their territory as might a hiker or swimmer. Nor are we someone forgetting to check their boots when out camping, to find a scorpion or deadly spider that has no choice but to lash out. For mosquitoes, man is prey. They live and breed around us, come looking for us, and very often spend a morning or an entire evening tormenting us. Mosquitoes are a singular curse on man, the one and only pariah among all living beings. Indeed, they are a pariah on the phenomenon of life itself.
We do not loath viruses and bacteria, we only dread them. And though spiders and snakes and scorpions can hurt pretty badly or kill even, they are not despicable. No living creature that is remotely dangerous torments us other than the mosquito. From bacteria to sharks, the countless creatures that might pose a threat to us do so only when we threaten them. With the exception perhaps of viruses and bacteria, all these creatures are in fact wondrous and beautiful. Even slugs, caterpillars and worms, and puffer fish, electric eels and poisonous sea anemones, you name it, none of them seek us out and hunts us down as does the loathsome mosquito.
Now, a zoologist might find a mosquito fascinating and may marvel at its 175 million year evolutionary trajectory. Hell, it outlived the dinosaurs. Though how one wishes it had gone the same way. Anyway, the zoologist is welcome to it, and frankly I’m not interested. When I hear reports scientists have found a way of sterilising mosquitoes so they would die-out in a generation, I rejoice. I want to send them money, support their research, and volunteer to go out and spray the little bastards before they even get off the ground.
Ecologists warn mosquitoes are an important part of the food chain, for frogs, birds and other types of animal that are in turn an important part of the ecosystem. But as I sit here tormented by yet another of these devilish creatures while I write (they actually look like devils, if you’ve ever stared one in the face) I say to hell with the frogs and birds.
I have two recurring mosquito fantasies that I would like to share. One involves outer space and the other sadism. I’ll break you in gently and deal with outer space first.
This is an unlikely scenario at the moment, but, it could happen one day. You are alone in a crippled spaceship light years from earth. There has been some sort of disaster – someone went berserk just after you were awakened from cryo-sleep, murdered the rest of the crew, and then killed themselves whilst you were taking a shower, for example. Your choice now is to live out your life in solitude, for which you have enough supplies to live to a ripe old age. Or, if you cannot face the unspeakable loneliness and desolation, to commit suicide and end it all.
You’re not the suicide type, and after a couple of days you wake up one night itching. This happens on a few more occasions until you finally discover there is a family of mosquitoes on board. They probably sneaked into the cryo-chambers when you were frozen before lift off.
What do you do? No other living thing is on board. No plants, not even a mushroom. Communication with earth is impossible and all you have by way of living company are the mosquitoes.
Of course, it’s a no-brainer, and you hunt them down relentlessly. As wondrous as life and being alive are, it’s not enough to save mosquitoes even in outer space. To save them you will have to allow them to suck your blood and torment you, because they will not survive alone. They are, to put it mildly, not good company, and the price for whatever perverse company they may offer is literally blood. Plus boils and itching. If you manage to get them all, the resulting slow descent into insanity born of solitude unknown to any human before, is worth it. If you can’t wipe the bastards out, suicide is preferable.
Having by way of this hypothetical, though all too possible, horror story brought into sharp relief the true evil of these creatures, you will be prepared for the second fantasy, and also prepared to accept the uncomfortable implications. (If you remain unconvinced here’s the Pink Panther being tormented by a mosquito).
If I ever become a god, I often muse to myself as I think calming thoughts to get to sleep, I would endow mosquitoes with consciousness, and then torture them!
Isn’t that a lovely thought?
Sadly as things stand that’s all it is, as currently my fantasy of torturing mosquitoes so they know about it, looking into their pleading eyes, hearing their little cries for mercy, remains in the realm of the impossible.
In the interim, however, I am working on a way to catch, pin down, and then snip off the proboscis of one of these abominations to life. And then let it free. To starve to death! *
Ha! Ha!
I know. I realise. But I did warn you. This is sadistic and quite worrying. But I assure you, I only pulled off the wings of one, very well, perhaps two flies as a child, which I would say is a healthy and perhaps necessary act when done early in life. Such urges exist within us, particularly in the curiosities of childhood, and it is better to give them some form of minor expression sooner rather than later, to early on realise it is wrong. However, such urges are worrying when they come to us as adults, when there is no one to teach us, and where indeed it provides some satisfaction.
With the exception, I argue, of when it comes to mosquitoes.
I shall not share the forms of torture I would inflict on the recently made conscious mosquitoes. Because it is actually hard to think of how one might do it, and also make it last a long time. But if you have the power to make them conscious, then perhaps you also have the power to transform them. I would, then, turn them into Tory MPs, and maybe a few from UKIP, and unleash upon them other mosquitoes at just the right rate (say one or two an hour). This would ensure that as soon as they got deeply into a task, or were snugly in bed or watching telly, or wanted to simply recline and stare at the sky and contemplate the beauty and wonder of the world, which it is in the Tory manifesto to wreck, they would be prevented by the sound of buzzing, the jab of a proboscis, followed by an itch from Hell.
* Mosquitoes do not in fact feed on our blood but use it to produce their eggs. As indeed, the mosquitoes that actually prey on us are female. Such it is only in the natural world thankfully. I also have said nothing about the ones that really pose a danger, which actually kill people through diseases such as malaria and zika.
