There are currently two little green bugs slowly suffocating in a plastic bag on the dashboard of my truck. I feel a bit bad about their captivity and eminent demise, but at the same time I'm fascinated by the fact that they were in this bag, almost all day, in my truck, often parked under the full San Fernando valley sun, on a hot day almost 4th of July day, and they're still *at this very moment* alive and literally kicking in that bag.

The bugs look like little grasshoppers, but with short seed like bodies. Like grasshoppers, they have long gangly arms and spookie, feely antennae. Their means of locomotion, like the grasshopper, is the hop. I must conclude that they are some type of grasshopper.

I plucked my victims, one each, off of my two potted elm trees this very morning. They along with throngs of their cohorts had first trashed an entire basil plant much in the way the band the Who was known to trash hotel rooms. I put them in the bag with the intent of exhibiting them to a knowledgeable nursery worker in order to devise a plan to eradicate their species from my garden. I wasn't able to make it to the nursery today.

That basil plant is wrapped in a plastic bag somewhere in a landfill along with twenty or so of my dashboard-bugs' brethren. Once they've been packed deep into the landfill, rolled over by a bulldozer 3 or four times over, I wonder, are they still chompin' away on my basil?
- posted Sunday, July 03, 2005 9:33 PM by Steve