Fly smashing depthlessfulness
Sep. 12th, 2005 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I was reminded of this by
mistress_nomad's post mentioning her dad killing houseflies.
Maybe three or four weeks ago, I was awakened by a pesky housefly. As it buzzed around me, an intuition told me to just grab it in midair.
Huh? Okay, I've caught and killed flies in many interesting ways. I've whacked them with damp bar mops. I've trapped them under plastic containers. I've shot them with rubber bands (enough to have developed considerable skill at this). I've knocked a housefly into some ice, such that it became cold and inert. I've stunned a deer fly with a hat. Once, I even defeated a deer fly by breathing on it. No, my breath wasn't that bad. It was flying around my head, out in the woods, and I deliberately blew it backward into a spider web. Sometimes, I'm fast enough to whack a sitting housefly with my bare hand. Twice, out of countless attempts, I have managed to grab barehanded a sitting housefly. Yes, I know they jump up and backward when they take off, but this has almost never helped me to actually catch them.
So this intuition caught me off guard. I can sometimes catch flour moths in midair, but they're slow. Houseflies are fast and nimble - far more so than I. Nonetheless, I sat still for a moment, and just as the fly shot by, I grabbed at it. And there it was, buzzing furiously within my closed fist. (What I was trained to do then was to shake it, throw it hard at the floor, then stomp it. Instead, I shook it, threw it hard at the floor, realized I was barefoot, grabbed my shoe, and smooshed it just as it recovered from the shaking.)
That very evening, I started to mention this odd occurrence to my earliest guests at Philosophy Dinner. With the first sentence of my story not yet complete, another housefly buzzed by me. With no conscious intention, my hand shot out and grabbed it in midair.
WTF? Two for two?!? Okay, maybe I'm a Zen master, but I didn't know that really worked the way it does in the movies. ;-)
The next logical step, which occurred to both my guests and me, was to try with chopsticks. So every four or five days, I've been making an attempt. Unfortunately, the Force hasn't been with me; I haven't even caught a flour moth that way. I've had these chopsticks by my computer for a few weeks, and they remained clean until yesterday evening, when I found a dead moth stuck to the tip of one of them.
I guess the Force works in mysterious ways.
(BTW, while we're on the subject, I do try to kill bugs quickly, without torturing them, despite my suspicion that their nervous systems are too simple to experience "pain and suffering" the way we think of it.)
In conceptually related news, spending two years not firing a single arrow seems to have greatly improved my archery skill.
(Just as I'm posting this, it occurs to me to put those two ideas together. No, I am not going to shoot at insects in my house with arrows. Though
icarusfallen8 did just discover that my walls are made of Styrofoam...)
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Maybe three or four weeks ago, I was awakened by a pesky housefly. As it buzzed around me, an intuition told me to just grab it in midair.
Huh? Okay, I've caught and killed flies in many interesting ways. I've whacked them with damp bar mops. I've trapped them under plastic containers. I've shot them with rubber bands (enough to have developed considerable skill at this). I've knocked a housefly into some ice, such that it became cold and inert. I've stunned a deer fly with a hat. Once, I even defeated a deer fly by breathing on it. No, my breath wasn't that bad. It was flying around my head, out in the woods, and I deliberately blew it backward into a spider web. Sometimes, I'm fast enough to whack a sitting housefly with my bare hand. Twice, out of countless attempts, I have managed to grab barehanded a sitting housefly. Yes, I know they jump up and backward when they take off, but this has almost never helped me to actually catch them.
So this intuition caught me off guard. I can sometimes catch flour moths in midair, but they're slow. Houseflies are fast and nimble - far more so than I. Nonetheless, I sat still for a moment, and just as the fly shot by, I grabbed at it. And there it was, buzzing furiously within my closed fist. (What I was trained to do then was to shake it, throw it hard at the floor, then stomp it. Instead, I shook it, threw it hard at the floor, realized I was barefoot, grabbed my shoe, and smooshed it just as it recovered from the shaking.)
That very evening, I started to mention this odd occurrence to my earliest guests at Philosophy Dinner. With the first sentence of my story not yet complete, another housefly buzzed by me. With no conscious intention, my hand shot out and grabbed it in midair.
WTF? Two for two?!? Okay, maybe I'm a Zen master, but I didn't know that really worked the way it does in the movies. ;-)
The next logical step, which occurred to both my guests and me, was to try with chopsticks. So every four or five days, I've been making an attempt. Unfortunately, the Force hasn't been with me; I haven't even caught a flour moth that way. I've had these chopsticks by my computer for a few weeks, and they remained clean until yesterday evening, when I found a dead moth stuck to the tip of one of them.
I guess the Force works in mysterious ways.
(BTW, while we're on the subject, I do try to kill bugs quickly, without torturing them, despite my suspicion that their nervous systems are too simple to experience "pain and suffering" the way we think of it.)
In conceptually related news, spending two years not firing a single arrow seems to have greatly improved my archery skill.
(Just as I'm posting this, it occurs to me to put those two ideas together. No, I am not going to shoot at insects in my house with arrows. Though
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