APRIL 18TH 2010

It’s a well-known fact that female praying mantises bite off the heads of males during intercourse; they fuck them and immediately kill them. It’s considered sexual cannibalism. I consider it a sane reaction to an insane situation. The males pump more vigorously after they’ve been beheaded, which makes me hate them down to their gooey core. The truth of the matter is that the females would rather be eating, so the males often engage females in a courting dance in order to change their interest from devouring them to mating with them; it’s a manipulative distraction. As if they have any idea what’s good for her, or any idea what they are getting themselves into.

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Where I am now is in the woods of rural Ohio. No one is allowed on this land but women, so I don’t mind so much that I have to co-exist in a cabin with thousand of ladybugs. The place is covered in them, their little red cloaked bodies moseying along every surface or hurrying through the air with rice-paper wings. They wait up for me to come home, nestled on my pillow until I gently brush them away and turn my back. They guard the screen door that’s falling off its hinges. They swim in the toilet, meeting their ultimate end in a swirl of piss and shit, and they congregate under the sponge on the sink. I look out the window and there they are, spying on me from the outside. They must expect to have meals with me because every time I go to pour myself some cereal they are awake and waiting at the bottom of the bowl, or resting on my avocado, or getting impatient on the lid of the almond butter. As I sit with my laptop, they crawl across the screen and stop right in the middle. You never pay attention to us anymore.

In the UK, they are called ladybirds. How much more delicate and classy! Yes, I like that name so much better. The name is derived from paintings of the Middle Ages that depicted the Virgin Mary wearing a red cloak. The spots are said to represent the seven sorrows and the seven joys of the Virgin. The ever-virgin. I see nothing but fourteen sorrows there.

I sit at the small table in the cabin and reread Rebecca Solnit’s book, “A Field Guide To Getting Lost.” I open to the page where I left off last and find a ladybird’s carcass between the words, “blue” and “distance.” The blue of distance. It refers to the blue that lingers on the horizon, that moving blue that’s the color of longing and desire. It represents the things we will never obtain, the changes we’ll never see, or perhaps the things we already have and are willing to discard in order to hold on to that feeling. We can travel through the sky, but we can never live in it. Herein lies the reason we love tragedies more than comedies. You can never touch the blue on the horizon, and you like it that way. We linger on; some thing’s are always far away.

I spot a baby praying mantis crawling across the kitchen table and close the book. She’s the length of a toothpick and visibly nervous, crawling slowly among a congregation of ladybirds. She’s uncertain how to behave in front of the other ladies knowing that she will inevitably sin, according to their standards. But she will do whatever it takes to survive: abandon, destroy and hope for the best. With no idea what’s to come, she lives up to her name: She raises her front legs and prays.