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This time of year is a special one. The leaves are changing colors and cascading off the trees into nooks and crannies underneath our windshield wipers, college football is back and you finally get to wear that fucking sweet jacket you got a sick deal on at that vintage store in July.
This brisk fall weather we’re enjoying before winter kicks us in the grundle is killing mosquitoes by the truckload, dropping them out of the sky like Maverick locking a Sidewinder missile onto a Russian MiG-28. While the layperson takes great joy in the weather-induced genocide of those pesky little shits, I feel a strange sense of melancholy because I believe mosquitoes are a necessary evil in the overall experience of the warmer months.
As you drink seasonal ales in a flannel and think of the quintessential elements of summers past, what comes to mind? Maybe you envision days spent roasting on the beach crushing Pacifico or sharing a joint with your buddy while you enjoy the view at the summit of a long hike. Maybe you reminisce about days on the lake being towed behind a boat on a taco-shaped tube while your dad tried to whip you over the wake and into the stratosphere. Do you think of golf outings or fruit wedges floating in your cocktail as you drink under a palapa? Or maybe you think of your early childhood when you would dick around all day with with your friends until you rode your bikes back to someone’s house for a sleepover. When I think of summer, I think of bug bites.
We’ve all woken up on a summer morning to find a smattering of pea-sized swollen abscesses on our extremities despite the tornado of bug spray we engulfed ourselves in before commencing the previous day’s activities. While part of me finds these tremendously irritating like most people, another part of me takes a sort of masochistic joy in itching the spot where a mosquito decided to stop for a swig of me-juice.
When you find yourself riddled in bug bites, it means you were doing summer right. Maybe you were shirtless by a river as you fly-fished beneath a breathtaking sunset and finished off a luke-warm six pack. Maybe you were hiking by a stream and filling your camera roll with tastefully curated stills of Mother Nature. Or maybe you were just sitting at a patio table at your favorite brewery with your people as you drank yourselves into a stupor and told stale jokes and old stories.
Bug bites are nature’s way of telling you that you were outside doing what you’re supposed to do during summer. It’s a badge of honor that says you weren’t indoors wasting precious moments of your life in an air conditioned room playing video games or watching the fire drill episode of The Office for the fiftieth time. Whichever activity found you outside around sunset in the proximity of those annoying vampire-bugs was an efficient use of the precious warm weather.
Call me crazy, but while I’m sitting in frost-covered duck blinds or on hillsides in the snow listening for elk bugles for the next several months, I’m going to wish the weather was warm enough for me to sleep in my truck bed and get bitten by a few skeeters. So next June when you’re bitching about the itchy bites covering your forearm, calves and knee-pits, take a moment and be thankful that it’s summer and you can be outside doing the stuff you love. See you next year, you buzzy motherfuckers, please don’t give me Zika..
Image via Shutterstock
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didn’t think I would ever hear someone refer to their blood as “me-juice” but here we are