Señora and I are friends with a couple, Harry and Susan, who live a little north of Chicago. A few weeks ago they drove down to visit their son in Springfield, IL, and afterwards they passed a couple days in the St. Louis area to visit with us and Susan’s sister. We had dinner with them one night on our patio and dinner the next night at her sister’s house. After dinner each night we passed many agreeable hours on our patio gabbing and partaking of water and sunlight that nature had graciously turned into the pleasant and pleasing beverage called wine.
On the night we ate dinner at our house we were having a bit of a problem with flies. I started talking about wanting to get one of those guns that shoots salt in order to hunt down flies. A week or so after their visit, there arrived an unexpected package from Amazon. Within the box was a pair of Bug Zappers, aka electronic fly swatters. Initially I felt a bit sadistic, but it is really too much fun to watch those pesky transporters of disease and pestilence pop, sizzle and smoke as I glory in their death cries. I think perhaps you have gotten the idea that I really like their gift.
Fast forward a bit to this Monday morning, and I was taking a Spanish class via Skype with my grammar instructor from Guatemala. He swatted the air just after correcting one of my many faux pas.
I asked him, “Are you swatting at me or a fly.”
Being a bit of a wise ass – like me – he paused dramatically, then he said, “Fly,” somewhat unconvincingly.
I started telling him about my new toy that our friends from Chicago gave me. I happened to have one them handy so I showed it to him. He then started asking me a barn full of questions about my new play pretty. After a bit, he said wait a minute, took off his headphones, and returned carrying the exact Bug Zapper that I had in my hand!
We both were having a hearty laugh over the coincidence, I, sitting practically in the middle of the United States, had the same Chinese contraption as my Spanish teacher sitting in the World Heritage Site city of Antigua, Guatemala.
Fast forward again to this Tuesday morning. Again I am on Skype, this time speaking with a gentleman, Moisés, for conversational practice. Moisés lives in San Salvador, El Salvador. I begin telling him the story of our friends in Chicago, my teacher in Guatemala and the Bug Zappers. He reaches off screen and brings up a yellow Bug Zapper about 25% bigger than mine. He then began to vividly detail the carnage he used to do with it to mosquitos when he lived on the coast of El Salvador.
Thursday I speak with a Mexican young man who lives in Honduras, and next week with a young lady in Ecuador and an accounting student who lives in La Paz, Bolivia. If any of them have a Bug Zapper I will know that my conspiracy theory suspicions are correct, that Susan is actually the head of an international organization planting Bug Zappers in insect prone zones. I suspect that they interact with the chips Big Pharma implanted in our bodies when we were vaccinated… It is time to ransom the Nigerian princess, send your credit card numbers via the Kremlin to…
As I often tell Susan, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em