Well, shit. Now I feel profoundly sad that I killed a mosquito at dusk. Becuase now I’m like… I have this story in my head about how this mosquito just got creampied—maybe by, like, multiple other mosquitos—and was about to have a little afters kinda snack/beverage and, like, tracked the movements of this, like, huge fucking monster using her compound eyes so that she’d have something to make babies with and then just, like, fucking perish… but now she, like, sits in the hot wax of the burning candle where she will be preserved forever, probably, or at least the dead mosquito equivealent of forever. Or, I guess, the me equivalent of forever. Because really, it’s going to be in there for the whole rest of my lifetime, probably. Which is obviously disturbing in its own way, but also beautiful, blah blah blah.

Anyway, compassion for mosquitos just unlocked. I feel like they might be the ultimate test of enlightenment. Are you able to not kill the mosquito? Are you able to sit with your mosquito bites without scratching them? I think that would be step one. I think step one is, like, sitting with your itchy mosquito bites and realizing that it’s actually not that bad—well, it is that bad, but not for long. I think that’s a little taste of enlightenment.

The full enlightenment approach to this situation would be to be able to feel a mosquito land on you and watch its needle go into your skin and know that it is draining the blood from you, blood that it will use to create new life… to recognize that for you to swat the mosquito would be to deny it a chance at creating life… and isn’t karma just, like, about trying to make the most opportunities for life outside of your own life?

I feel like… there’s no world in which more life is a bad thing. Why else would life be literally teeming out of every fucking surface, cracking through concrete to spring up and experience what’s out there? The world is teaching us to value life, and the most difficult substrate for that lesson is mosquitos. Because they’re ostensibly fucking annoying. But are they, really? Are the bites really that bad? Is part of your distress related to the fact that your blood is being taken from you? It’s so little though, isn’t it?

I guess the fact that there are regions where mosquito bites are literally deadly is a whole nother story, though…… but in those cases, I suppose it’s not like the idea is to wage war against the mosquitos. I feel like there would be a more, uhhhhhhhhh, life-affirming way of protecting yourself against mosquitos. Like, nets over your bed and stuff like that. But even then….. I guess sometimes it’s not enough.

This is a digression, but a necessary one, because ultimately, in some way, isn’t it my obligation to be loyal to humans first and foremost, given that they are the best-positioned individuals for making the “world a better place,” i.e., making it possible for more life to spring up?

Shouldn’t I work on a campaign for better understanding of mosquitos? I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t find a way to talk about how mosquitos are such human-killers. It is far beyond me to try to suggest to people in malaria-endemic regions that they should learn to accept being bitten by mosquitos. That feels pretty out of line. So then, I guess I’m only speaking to a very particular population—that is, people who live in non-endemic regions, the ones who are able to coexist more peacefully, though not un-annoyingly, with mosquitos.

I don’t know, brother. But in my case, for me personally, sitting here in this little building with big garage doors open on two of the four sides, at dusk……… I am learning to accept the presence of mosquitos, especially as I look at the one I killed, who now lays at the bottom of this pool of hot wax. Or is it the one who’s floating at the top? There are two mosquitos in there, now that I really look closely. Three, actually. Maybe more.

I’m sure it’s all very poetic. The crickets chirping and stuff, too. What’s the deal with them, by the way?

This is the problem of knowledge accumulation. At a certain point you have to remind yourself that all of the knowledge is not different from all of the other knowledge, and that approaching knowledge in these artificially discrete chunks is actually not really……… the way to do it…… life, that is. Like, “relentless pursuit of knowledge”… it’s one of those phrases that sounds cool, and it’s, like, “Ohhh, we should all be lifelong learners,” and shit…. My thing is, there comes a time for action and creation and not just consumption, even if that consumption is of things that are contributing to your knowledge.

That said, what’s the deal with crickets? Lol