As part of my initiation into the secrets of Los Angeles, which are many and storied, which has taken place over the years of my exile here, I have found that there are these bugs in LA that the population calls "water bugs" which look much like cockroaches but are twice as big. Unlike your standard East Coast or European roach, a down to earth proletarian who makes an honest living in your home stealing your left overs, these bugs live under the city by the millions, but not in the homes. They only come into the homes to find water during the dry season, such as now. They are unknown to science and assumed to have been living here since the dawn of time, and now living in harmony with mankind, without biting or infestation. When there is a drip somewhere, they come to drink of it. It is remarkable how essentially medieval an average person's knowledge of their world still is, outside of those areas in which he or she is proficient.
But that is not that bad, you are probably thinking, water bugs don't merit a diary when the debt ceiling is in play. Indeed, the majority of the population thinks little of this issue of the millions of water bugs moving silently beneath our feet at all times, except maybe the for the parents of the infants who are sacrificed to the giant Water Bug of North Hollywood (naturally they are bigger and more aggressive in the Valley). What makes this story special to me, and perhaps for a fleeting moment to you, my dear reader, is that they have apparently chosen me as their king, or they may believe that my body contains a fluid they think of as holy ambrosia. Or morel likely they believe in something far different and fantastic.
They will often come out at night and just stare at me. One came to my pillow last night, which creeped me the fuck out, just crawled as close to me as it could and stared longingly into my eyes, as if trying to tell me something. A few months before one laboriously crawled toward me through the closet as I sat by the computer. I could hear his tedious shuffling, becoming progressively more and more disturbed by it, as if being sucked into a David Kronenberg film. Finally he fearlessly crawled out into the light, and came to sit by my chair, looking up at me. At first I though they were cockroaches and was severely unnerved by this behavior, so unnatural to any of the cockroaches I had known before. But now I mostly just wish I knew what they want from me. It cannot be assumed that they are here as simple messengers to relate something to me about my life in terms I can grasp. That seems to be an absurd anthropomorphism, a solipsistic self-delusion. The bugs have their own world and their own understanding of it.
Milorad Pavic, the greatest writer the Yugoslavian collapse produced, noted on the possibility of communication between realms as different as the divine and the temporal, or between humans and bugs. In an entry on a minor Islamic demon musician in the Khazar Dictionary, a dictionary written three times to reflect the Christian, Jewish and Muslim realities, the demon is said to have once asked a man, "How could a being infinite in time and power, existing outside of time, be able to tell us, the fleeting images on the screen of Its Creation, anything which he could be sure we would understand fully?" When the man could not answer, the demon showed him by silently swatting a bug and asking, "Do you think the bug could not understand fully the meaning of that act?" I am lead inexorably therefore to consider the role of death in this conversation.
On a personal level, and if I may be so frank in so anonymous a setting, I associate all bugs with death, and most particularly cancer, which since childhood I have pictured as a crab interminably cutting at your body from the inside with its merciless claws. Even though my mother died of leukemia, a cancer which does not really have a tumor like structure, I picture this illness as such to this day. That is certainly the image I had of my own tumor, a liposarcoma attached neatly to my hip, growing steadily until it was the size not of a crab, but of a good lobster. Fortunately it did not invade the bone, was not overly malignant according to the lab report read aloud to me over the telephone, and was fairly cleanly removed by a father-son team of fairly competent surgeons. Now every six months I drink radioactive goo and step into the spinning maw of the CT scanner, and monitor slowly as it becomes once again difficult to sleep on my left side as the stubborn tumor regrows. I cannot feel the mad hypertropic cells multiplying out of control tearing through some innocent tissue to found new tumors somewhere in my body. I don't know if that's happening, I must rely on the CT scans. But the scurrying bugs on the outside feel like a projection of that grim process, a visible manifestation of it. It is hard not to shudder then when I see a bug and think of its brothers on the inside, also gnawing.
So I am still left to wonder, what do these bugs mean in my life? It's hard to imagine an authority to which I could turn for an answer to that question. Perhaps a Navajo shaman? I'm sure I could rustle one up on the LA Craigslist in about two hours, but it would probably only turn to be an undercover vice cop, and I couldn't trust anything he said, as those guys will say anything, do anything or have anything done to them in order to secure a conviction. Additionally, most cops and soldiers are Manichean in tendency, and I just don't need to hear about Ahriman at night when the bugs are hiding under my pillow.
12:37 PM PT: Well, to conclude the theme of bugs and death, an exterminator will be arriving shortly to communicate to them the thing we most have in common - our mortality. Little fuckers.