Today the Lt. Col and I bicycled down the street a ways to skulk around in the shrubs and examine the construction of some hurricane plantation shutters on a house that's for sale.
On the way back, I noticed I was being stalked by at least nine butterflies! It felt like a miracle or at the very least, a message from THE CREATOR or THE UNIVERSE or something. I wanted to commemorate it, but obviously I couldn't take a picture of myself. And the Lt. Col won't ride too close to me for fear of a wipeout. (He already had one of those and I wasn't even involved.) So, here I was, riding along with all these butterflies. Mostly they stayed behind me but sometimes they came up beside me.
This picture I drew is an accurate representation. (Except for the fact I'm hovering over the road, which can only be explained by my complete lack of artistic ability. Oh, and I wasn't
really wearing a helmet either, but Mr. We Might Get Sued wants me to be responsible with my drawings and advocate bicycle safety...helmet probably saved his life, yada yada yada. Helmets sure didn't save my tailbone when I wrecked. My ass hurt to sit down for three whole months.) Anyway...
"Look at me! I'm the friggin' PIED PIPER of the butterfly kingdom!" I yelled backward. Then I wobbled and nearly ran into the curb, so I decided to pay more attention to the road. ( I was riding slow because butterflies can't keep up in a headwind if you ride like Lance Armstrong or something, just FYI.)
But it got me to thinking about the migration pattern of the Monarchs. I'm waaaay too lazy to research it, but I know they go up to Canada somewhere and back down to Mexico (I saw that on NatGeo). Sometimes it takes them five generations to make the whole trip. Since it's fall, I figure they must be heading back to Mexico, cause paper thin wings can't possibly fare well in subzero temperatures.
Pondering those delicate wings reminded me of mean kids who catch them and injure them with rough play. Or stick pins in them for collections. Or try to put dental floss leashes on a bunch of them during ill-fated attempts to fly (so I've
HEARD, anyway). And I thought to myself, "These butterflies need an ADVOCATE, that's what."
So I tested their loyalty to me as a leader by swerving all over the street to see if they would blindly follow. And they DID. We looked like a beautifully choreographed orange, black (and semi-faded summer tan) ribbon dance, weaving and swerving until some asshole darted out of his driveway and wiped out half of our Troupe with the grill of his Lincoln Town Car. The ugly incident didn't end there, though.
"Have you been drinking?" The Lt. Col yelled from behind me. Distracted by my own grief and the Lt. Col's road rage, I hit some loose gravel, skidded, and nearly took out a landscaper who was working on a retaining wall. I don't think I lost any more subjects, but the magic was clearly gone. (And there's a sprinkler installer who probably won't come within twenty yards of me again.)
At that point it was clear to me that butterflies could benefit from some genetic alteration to toughen them up.
1) They probably need stingers to stop mean kids from fucking with them.
And 2) They need some kind of armor to protect them from cars.
Or 3) Maybe they just need to fly faster for evasion purposes.
We'll probably have to cross breed them with wasps and hummingbirds. But I'm allergic to wasps and so is the Lt. Col. So we'd have to wear those Bee Keeping uniforms, probably. And maybe keep an Epi-Pen on us in case of anaphylactic shock. Also, the wasps might sting the butterflies accidentally unless we artificially inseminate them. But how in the world would we extract wasp sperm? Hummingbirds lay eggs, so now we're into inter-species breeding and that might not work
at all. Man, being a butterfly geneticist is probably better left to the experts. Still, it's an idea worth considering. The honey bees are disappearing. Probably
also due to those assholes in Lincoln Town Cars.
This one's going on the idea page.
