Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day-
I miss you mom! Have a Guinness for me, eh?
Love,
Zombie Slayer

Two straight days of tromping around in the rainforest has me feeling a little delirious. The welts on the arms have only migrated around, but I think that I might know what it was. I showed Aloyce and he said that it was the hairy caterpillars!? I know, it’s crazy but those suckers sit on the undersides of leaves and as we pass through the undergrowth with our arms up to push it out of the way they are probably brushing up on my arms and some of the hairs are getting through my shirtsleeves. Anyway, that’s the theory for now, but really it could be anything. There are just too many bugs to keep track of. I’m not insane because of them yet…..Not like when I was living in the moldy basement room on Newell street in Durham and had cave crickets splatting up against the walls and my face in the middle of the night! It literally got to the point where I was waking up from nightmares while slapping them off my head. Cave crickets have a special place reserved in hell. They live off of mold and each other’s body parts and they’re BIG. Killing them makes a disgusting huge mess. They’re breeding in basements all over the US Southeast, preparing to unleash some kind of radical new biological plague on mankind. Any self respecting zombocalypse survivor should heed this threat. They all must be killed before its too late…. .Anyway, my current insanity isn’t that bad yet. Being attacked while I’m awake makes it much easier to deal with.

I actually LIKE a lot of these bugs. Some are just amazing in the way they have adapted to surviving in the African forest. If you sit on and watch the ground long enough (and I do) the hustle bustle of the bug world is more entertaining than a PIXAR film. In a single cubic foot of ground space there are any number of dramas being played out- little highways of travelers, epic battles, helicopters buzzing overhead, supersonic jets roaring by and monstrously strange creatures materializing from unknown faraway lands past the nearest bush. Occasionally, one of the these busy creatures is lifted into the stratosphere on the end of a tectonic plate, blinded and disoriented with bright flashes and loud rumbles from the sky and after ages and ages cast back down into foreign lands. The result: mdudu of the day. This little tiny guy tried real hard to hide from me by camouflaging itself with bits of wood and other matter- didn’t work though.