Cicada season is upon us in the Southeast. God's Creepiest Creation has taken over Nashville just in time for the summer, and it really couldn't be more disgusting.
For those of you blessed enough to not know what cicada season means, there is this very large and disgusting type of black, red-eyed locust that (in certain parts of America) crawls out of the ground by the millions for about six weeks every 13 or 17 years in order to mate, lay eggs, and then promptly die. They make a deafening noise throughout the region, perching in trees, flying around drunkenly, and falling to the earth in exhaustion. People's reactions range from mild amusement or annoyance to paranoid shrieking or hand-flapping at the suspected sound or sight of one of these little monsters.
It's a popular thing to complain about them or make fun of them. Whether you have a deep-seated fear of cicadas or find the terror of others to be a constant source of entertainment, you always enjoy laughing at them. Crazy-looking, obnoxious bugs whose life exists only for the purpose of reproduction? What's not to laugh at?
At the same time, although I find cicadas incredibly revolting, I've realized that, ironically, the simplicity of the life of the cicada is actually the ideal for which every human seeks. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? What am I supposed to do with my one short life? How can I find a purpose without compromising my own happiness?
These questions are perhaps strongest when one graduates from school, and the terror is overwhelming. The pressure of family, friends, and bills weigh upon the mind even as the constant rejection from one job or another saps one's enthusiasm and confidence. They are strong, too, when you find yourself in the middle of the American economic recession in your 40's, your job pulled out from under you and the prospect of starting a new career more daunting than ever.
In school, when they teach you about bullying, they explain to you that the bully often feels insecure and sometimes jealous and that these feelings motivate him to pick on the kids weaker (and often smarter) than he. Perhaps we as a society mock the cicadas not out of a sense of dismissal but rather out of a latent jealousy. What would we not give to have the meaning or purpose of our lives to be built into our DNA? Our instincts?
What wouldn't we give to be as fulfilled as the simplest of creatures?
Well, it certainly is an interesting thought, but I for my part dislike cicadas not because of jealousy but because of disgust and irritation and extreme annoyance and fear and sadness and horror and hunger and thirst and exhaustion and sleepiness and fittingness and excitement and bitterness and confusion and propriety and, most of all, justice.
ReplyDeleteLet's discuss this and other things over lunch sometime...because I'm back home!
- Chris Gautsch
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ReplyDeleteSorry, typo in last comment. :P
ReplyDeleteI think "justice" is the best part of your objections. :P
And yes, coffee needs to happen. :)