King August's Motley Insect Kingdom

As you read this, the middle of summer is upon us, with its vacations, trips to the pool and outdoor libations. We all have our favorite summertime activities and forms of relaxation. For me, however, there are a few downsides to the summer season: heat waves, high humidity, ear-splitting thunder, heavy downpours, and the overabundance of insects. The last item on the list, bugs, are what bother me and others in many ways; it is about these unpleasant life forms that I entertain you with a funny and interesting account. Hell, insects are something that we all like to discuss on social media!

Unfortunately for us, we are starting August, which I consider the peak of insect season in the Lehigh Valley. In eastern Pennsylvania, insects abound from early or mid-April until late October, but the peak of bug season always seems to be the month of August, creating a very buggy Musikfest in the heart of Bethlehem. Thus, you Fest-goers will be swatting gnats and enduring various insects landing in your open containers of intoxicating brews! The cicada killers come out in early August each year, completing nature's array of scary, dirty, pesky insects. The hazy, hot, humid weather of August, along with lush vegetation, make this month the perfect time for avoiding ants, gnats, flies and spiders, as well as increasingly aggressive stinging insects, such as bees, wasps and hornets. King August rules the insect world, making it his personal domain!

The human distaste for insects is universal, as is our deep emotional fear of them. Bugs are nature's intentional ugliness when it comes to living things, just as the Brutalist style of architecture is humanity's form of this. They definitely represent function over form and mar the beauty of outdoor areas that we normally enjoy. Buggy places that we hate often include beaches, marshes, forests, rivers, creeks and lakes. Any body of water will attract numerous insects, including mosquitoes, especially in the evening when we are enjoying outdoor recreational activities. Insects make our backyards uninhabitable, ruin our picnics and scare the hell out of our children. They can make the outdoors miserable during the summer months.

The obvious reality is that we are even more uncomfortable with insects when battling them indoors. Bugs, including spiders, often have to be killed so that they don't multiply or attack us in our sleep. They land on our computer screens, interrupt our favorite TV shows and make a blurry mess on our smart phones. Even as I was writing this, my computer screen was attacked by this small gnat that just would not die! Then, when we do kill insects, we have to deal with the splatty mess or the smell (as given off by stink-bugs). This is an unpleasant task that makes many of us appreciate the cooler weather.

 

To our continuing dismay, insects of all sorts invade our homes and apartments, being the unwanted visitors that disgust us. Insects can really get into things! They burrow themselves into our sheets, attack our clothing and travel in our suitcases from one city to the next. When they infest our homes, we are forced to spend our hard-earned money on exterminators, even living out of hotel rooms until our homes are safe once again. These things make for great episodes of TV sit-coms, but do not humor us in real life!

Throughout the muggy summer season, we are constantly confronted with gnats and small flies that land on us and pester us. The buggy dusk periods of mid-to-late summer can make it hard to see when they get into our eyes and land all over our skin. It can feel like they're nagging us to death! Horse-flies are also irritating with their loud buzzing and frenetic movement. Biting flies are the worst, giving a little prick of pain, and are very numerous in Delaware, with its flat, marshy land and warm, humid climate. Unlike stinging insects, pesky little bugs annoy the hell out of us every summer, making us savor our air-conditioned living rooms.

Too often, of course, insects attack, spreading disease, intense pain and serious danger. Insects can indeed be very dangerous, especially in the case of mosquitoes carrying diseases. Bees, wasps and hornets can also be very deadly when they attack in mass. Each year, according to the CDC, almost 100 Americans are killed when they stumble upon bee hives or hornets' nests. Spiders can also be poisonous, especially in humid, lush southern states, including the Gulf Coast region. I've known people even in Pennsylvania who have been bitten by poisonous spiders, requiring doctor visits or trips to the emergency room.

Besides putting our lives in danger, insect attacks torment our pets and put us through considerable pain and discomfort. Bugs make our pets go mad, especially fleas, ticks, mosquitoes and flies. They will have dogs chasing their tails and cats freaking out! Because our pets can't speak to us, we don't realize what is bothering them when they are attacked by insects. Even when bites and stings don't bring serious injury or death, bee and wasp stings have us screaming in pain, while mosquito bites have us scratching for days, interfering with our sleep on those sticky, uncomfortable summer nights.

Of course, many of us have a natural fear of spiders and stinging insects. First, there is the element of surprise, often leading to flinching or even spilling a cup of hot coffee, as I have done! Those at the Wise Bean can attest to this! Often, our fears have their origin with being stung as a child. These experiences stick with us because children have less tolerance for pain and more sensitive skin. Unfortunately, for some people this can create a phobia which immobilizes them for years. Most dangerous to us is when stinging insects surprise us while we are driving or operating machinery.

As a veteran of many vivid nightmares, I can tell you that many of our scariest, most disturbing dreams involve angry hordes of insects. The natural fear of insects enters our subconscious minds, even giving the feeling of intense pain to these nightmares. Movies play on this fear by incorporating insects into important scenes or relating them to undesirable characters, such as the Death's Head moth being symbolic of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. The scariest movie I've seen about insects is They Nest, a 2000 film shown on TV about a new species of deadly, man-eating cockroaches that devastate a coastal New England town, terrorizing a troubled doctor and his lover. The movie was so grotesque that it gave me nightmares at age 20, though I did enjoy watching it twice!

For our War on Bugs, many of you will suggest bug sprays, nets or citronella candles, but I have yet to find a bug spray that actually works. It's already too much effort for many of us to apply sunscreen, let alone bug spray as well! I do use sunscreen, but I definitely don't want too much gunk on me. As for citronella candles, we don't need to make our nefarious activities or amorous adventures look even more mysterious or erotic, like some arcane love cult!

 

Admit it: some insects are beautiful, cool or interesting. Beetles and lady bugs are photographed and showcased for their beauty, along with fireflies and butterflies. For children and adults alike, fireflies add to the wonder of a starlit summer night. What kid hasn't run around with a jar, collecting lightning bugs (as we call them in Pennsylvania)! Kids sometimes even add eating ants to their initiation rituals for joining their group of playmates during the long, boring days of summer vacation. As a kid, though, I was more excited about bugs than my mom was! We love butterflies, which inspire children's stories and add to the beauty of nature.

Overall, we hate insects with a passion, but they are a necessary evil. We all acknowledge this: just think about how many of us enjoy strolling through insect exhibits in museums, such as that of Smithsonian Institute's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., also featured in Silence of the Lambs. We are especially intrigued when deadly insects are showcased, though we're definitely glad they're behind the glass!  Insects are necessary and good, just usually unpleasant for human beings!

We, the Perpetual Absconders

As we are all well aware of, we are living in an age of vast societal changes, in everything from how we earn a living to how we navigate our relationships and where we choose to live. I am now forcing myself to adjust to this new way of life; it is the process of self-examination that every grown person must go through. By age 35, a person notices that the world of their youth no longer exists. In its place is a new world order comprised of new challenges facing their generation. This is true now more than ever, as we approach the year 2020!

 

I thought to blog about this topic one recent Friday afternoon as I read my new book at Barnes & Noble and sipped on a Grande coffee. There were a large number of single adults that were also enjoying the space on that cloudy, humid weekday. It was like a sober Happy Hour! In that time, I took in the zeitgeist of our era, reflecting on how the world has changed over my lifetime. When I was a little boy there were very few people out and about like that on a weekday, unless they were a family vacationing together at the Jersey Shore, or a group of delivery drivers grabbing a slice of pizza before heading back to work. In today's world, however, it's not uncommon to see people from all backgrounds engaged in a wide variety of activities at any given time. The weekday has been transformed, even largely done away with!

 

For our generation, our adult lives are vastly different from those of our parents. Our daily lives are not structured in ways they were for our moms and dads in 1988, or even 1998. We may lack structure, but that allows us to be more creative in how we live our lives and to ultimately build our own meaningful structures that inspire confidence and self-discipline. Unfortunately, the protective bubble of the 80s and 90s created a false sense of security for many people, as they failed to look at the big picture and to anticipate future changes. Some of them were shortsighted because they clung to false premises and relied upon their baser emotions.

Jobs come and go, relationships come and go, and most of us move relatively frequently, when compared to our parents, who often lived in the same homes for 20 or 30 years, relied upon long-term marriages and worked an 8-to-5, Monday-to-Friday job for the same company their entire adult lives, until they retired with their hefty pensions. In today's world, only 2% of American adults actually experience the traditional workweek of the 20th century! This may seem shocking, but it is absolutely true.

People today either work part-time jobs (often more than one) or full-time jobs consisting of shift work or extensive overtime. For nurses and service industry professionals, like many of you, your "workweek" consists of a string of consecutive long, grueling days, punctuated by a few much-needed days of rest that may or may not fall in the middle of the week. For example, my friend Carla Sagan is a full-time server at a restaurant in Easton, while also holding down a part-time job at a coffee shop in Bethlehem.

Carla experiences such a nontraditional work week, as her restaurant shifts understandably coincide with the weekends. Therefore, she also enjoys this midweek rest period. This arrangement is very common today as a great number of us are employed by the health care or service industries, a change from the regimented, structured factory work of the Industrial Age. Carla does enjoy meeting a wide variety of different people, along with the fact that she often works with Alyssa, her close friend and roommate. She definitely makes the most of her life in the service industry.

Another facet of today's tumultuous economy is the changeability of small businesses that occupy storefronts in cities and towns across America. It used to be that, in every city or town, there were several established businesses that had many long-term customers, spanning years or decades. Now, small businesses seem to come and go with frightening speed! As a result of this, urban local consumers always have to look for new places to shop, to dine, to drink or to enjoy a shot of espresso. Due to changing consumer needs, online marketing and advertising is more important than ever, creating job opportunities in those ever-growing fields. We have to figure out how to use the flash in the pan to create a good meal, for ourselves and others!

Sadly, though, many of us are unable to attain those new job positions. Some of us are very unlucky, being stuffed into private prisons, work release centers or homeless shelters. In a sense, the decline of the middle class has turned us all into "others," unacceptable to the dominant ruling class. You and I feel the sting of being rejected like this! People feeling rejected and lost often turn to crime or develop substance abuse issues. Marginalized individuals, however, can learn to band together to provide mutual support and to achieve a few important objectives. 

We do need this mutual support, as a great many of us are renters, instead of home owners. Even many couples with young children are forced to raise their families in rented apartments or houses, causing new problems that are coupled with a troubling sense of uncertainty. Home ownership is often out of the question for families today, due to the difficulties involved in obtaining a mortgage, lack of job security or insufficient funds in savings accounts or investments. The types of homes that more successful people are able to afford are small condos and townhouses, clustered together in dense suburban developments hardly suitable for quality living, let alone creating a child-friendly neighborhood. Our society has created a nightmare for families!

For single adults like many of us, it is very hard to find a suitable apartment to rent, due to long waiting lists, exorbitant fees or security deposits, competition among prospective tenants, bad credit, minor criminal convictions, or a host of other reasons. This often leads to short-term private deals in which urban, lower-class men and women live temporarily with friends in their apartments, leading to a "transient," come-and-go lifestyle that is completely unsuitable for anyone involved. Many of us in this segment of the population are living paycheck to paycheck, and may be only one step away from joining the ranks of the homeless or America's ever-growing criminal class. Not surprisingly, these dire straits didn't just appear out of nowhere; they were decades in the making!

The base emotions that people clung to since the 1980s were used against them by the powers-that-be who sought to screw over the average man and woman. Greedy, powerful individuals manipulated these emotions for their own benefit - like Donald Trump, but on a smaller scale. This process resulted in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the small, elite group of super-rich. The consequences for many of us are that living standards are poorer for our generation and we are forced to eat the scraps that fall from the rich man's table. In America today we are all trying to gather as many scraps as we can, in order to be full and satiated.

 

However, this is not all bad, since we do have tools at our disposal to prepare ourselves for this new high-tech, transitory world. Our main tool is, of course, the Internet which, along with social media, offers us information to learn new skills, and an online marketplace in which to use those skills to make extra money. As the Internet continues to grow, economic opportunities increase proportionally. The human imagination can be used to create countless new ways of earning a living online. You and I just have to adapt to the economy of 2018!

There are also positive perspectives for looking at social changes, as well as economic ones. These must be adopted if we are to survive and be happy in today's times. For example, the upside to these ever-changing living conditions, is that we get to meet and connect with a lot of great friends and acquaintances. If the living arrangement doesn't work out, one or both parties could move on to better living situations. This may be a nightmare for landlords, but the landlord-tenant relationship is never an easy one. This is all a process of adapting and growing as individuals.

Sex, relationships and parenthood are no longer centered around a lifelong legal commitment that keeps miserable, squabbling couples together merely out of a sense of duty, but are centered on loving, meaningful relationships. Even in the event of failed family units, the "serial marriage" invented by Boomers has been replaced by changing relationships and living arrangements that may be difficult but are actually easier than the process of bitter divorce, followed by awkward remarriage. These changes are actually better for people's children in the long run, because kids are less exposed to constant quarreling at home or to clever, but cruel courtroom maneuvers. A dysfunctional order is a bad order!

The children of the 2010s are growing up in a unique time. Due to a radically volatile economic landscape and a society in flux, the world is more dangerous and precarious for children growing up now than it was for us. When I was growing up in that late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, I felt safe, secure and invulnerable to economic changes in the adult world of my parents. For many my age, this created unrealistic expectations for our adult lives and for our own experiences with parenting. At least, with exposure to difficult personal finances, children today will grow into tougher and more resilient adults, more satisfied with interpersonal riches than with material ones that give only fleeting pleasure. Their high-tech gadgets will gradually take a back seat to kinship, community and human rights.

Our aging parents often seem unable to understand those of us in our 20s, 30s or 40s, viewing us as "the Peter Pan generation" or "developmentally disabled." They sometimes fail to recognize that we are living in the world that they created, as we are forced to fight our own battles out of economic necessity, family obligations and our own pride in who we are as individuals. It is the American Dream deferred and scattered into a thousand digital pieces, or widgets. The irony of the song "My Generation” (1965) by The Who, is that our generation - and not the Baby Boomers - are the ones who "get around!"

In future years, however, when we rebuild our world, we will make sure that everyone is represented in their economic/financial plight, their political objectives and their rightful place in American society. We can create a fairer, more progressive socioeconomic order for the coming decades. Our generation will have a lot of work to do as we enter middle age, but our goals are largely attainable, due to the example set by many great leaders in our times and in our recent past. These include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders. As we have seen in our lives, when everyone is taken care of, everyone prospers! Our future will never be perfect, but I foresee big steps in the right direction.

Champion of the Uncommon Blog

As you are aware of, blogging has become my favorite pastime, a great source of pleasure, enlightenment and my identity. It has improved my self-mastery and self-motivation over these past 17 months. The process has also empowered me to broach a number of subjects and topics that are near and dear to me and to common people everywhere, turning me into an established blogger. Now, however, I want to improve my blog and to turn it into my career, however long it will take to achieve that pinnacle of success. Most of all, I want to interact with my readers and to continue providing them with good quality entertainment.

To grow as a blogger I plan to blog much more frequently, posting to my blog at least once a week, usually on Mondays. Thus, I will become a dependable writer with timely content. I am currently reading an inspiring self-help book in order to motivate myself to adhere to writing deadlines that I've set up for myself. I'm a routine person and structure is what helps me reach my potential; this was true at NCC and it's true now! I want people looking forward to my Monday blog posts.

As my readership increases, I want to come up with interesting, fun, useful topics that people will enjoy reading about. I desire to observe everything around me and always be on the lookout for new blog topics. As I reach out to others, they will suggest worthwhile topics that are of interest to them. This is just one way in which my readers will have a hand in creating blog content. For an extra medium of communication, I want to start adding videos to my blog, with links to YouTube channels. In today's competitive social media environment, videos are more important than ever. Being in tune with the Internet of 2018 will keep me relevant and confident.

In order to keep improving, I strive to become more creative over time, trying out new types of blog posts. I am creating a product, and any product must always be new and exciting, in order to remain fun and marketable. Soon, I will begin what I call "urban exploring" - going out into urban neighborhoods and just walking around, so that I can write about the experience, provide some pictures and familiarize myself with the layout of the Lehigh Valley's three cities and bustling boroughs. Eventually, I want to provide such coverage of the many cool areas of Philadelphia, New York City, along with other Northeast cities! I hope to begin a process that will lead to a successful online career lasting several decades. It is something that I really enjoy doing, and it would be awesome to make money doing a job that I love! Who doesn't want that?

 

I am constantly reading up on how to improve the quality of my blog’s content. The blogosphere is extremely vast and complex, involving marketing concepts and jargon that I don't yet understand. Over the course of the coming weeks, I do plan to learn more about how to better promote my blog and to pick up the jargon used by experienced, successful bloggers. I have found a lot of useful information online, of course, but I also plan to take out books from the library to enlighten myself. I sometimes need the aesthetics of a good, old-fashioned textbook!

With an eye toward the future, I am starting to focus on marketing my blog, with the hope of attracting new readers and generating some income. I now have Google AdSense, but plan to develop other streams of income via numerous fundraising methods. My next way of earning money will be to respectfully request donations, eventually culminating in crowdfunding campaigns, hopefully collecting money from all over the world! There are always money-making opportunities on the Internet for anyone ready to seek them out. My short-term goal is to start making a small amount of online revenue by September. I plan to use that revenue to support further blogging activities aimed at expanding my reach and the scope of my blog's subject matter. If you're not growing, you're shrinking!

I hope to meet up and socialize with many of my blog readers in real life, away from the computer or smart phone. I have already had this experience and it is very rewarding, socializing with friends such as Shannon Clarke from Terra Cafe in Easton! It's a case of meeting someone that you already feel connected to and know a little about. Eventually, I want to host events at local venues, gathering my readers into a growing, but tight-knit local community. I value my readers as individual persons, not just numbers on a spreadsheet!

My blog page on Facebook has become a major part of my blogging effort, a conduit from my blog itself to my community of Facebook friends, including those from my daily visits to area coffee shops. My coffee shop persona and my blogger persona are closely tied together, because I find both worlds mutually compatible. This makes it easy for consumers perusing social media on their smart phones or other devices, having everything at the swipe of their finger!

Now that I am a bona fide blogger, I want to reach out to other, more experienced bloggers. I plan to connect to these bloggers and to share their blogs with you, the reader. To accomplish this I can use the Blogger.com web ring to connect with a number of successful, interesting bloggers. Bloggers like to appeal to each others' readers, often through guest blogging, something very common in the blogosphere. Eventually, I will also share blog posts of fellow bloggers on Facebook, so that many of you can sample their works, expanding your world view. A blog is like a good book; once you find one you enjoy, you should seek out similar ones.

I hope to feature some readers in my blog posts, whether it be pictures of friends, or just a person's basic bio and simple, heartfelt accounts of that person’s impact upon my life. I’ll keep it general and respect your privacy, so don’t worry! I do plan to interview a few of you, to provide quotes and ideas from my long-time readers; this will be a teaching tool for myself. In time, I hope to be interviewing influential, innovative people throughout the Lehigh Valley and beyond. I am preparing myself for this process by promoting local small businesses, bands and artists on my Facebook, using my timeline, blog page and coffee shop group.

As part of my overall personal growth, I have many ambitious goals and aspirations for my blog. I want to follow the progressive, grassroots business model. To avoid compromising my principles, I will only promote the products and services of businesses that I like, especially of friends that I'm close with. Both my writing and my marketing will rest on my reputation for authenticity, so that I will truly remain a man for the average person. I'll continue creating a winning product that will be worthwhile for all!