song of the day: english man in new york / STING
word of the day: soliton / a solitary wave; a quantum or quasiparticle propogated in the manner of a solitary wave

the weather is kickin' ass here, getting cold, crisp, heavier fall coat weather. but jesus (butt jesus?) it makes the bees and wasps nuts. they just get beside themselves, don't they? it drops below 70 degrees and mad-bee disease sets in, it's like they know they're going to die soon so they get desperate, but they're delirious too, flying all zig zag, flying into the house, but then they lose their energy and start walking around on the floor "oh, i'm tired, i'm so sleepy, got.... to......sting... one last..... person (*gasp*) is that a tunnel of light i see? to a wondrous celestial bee hive?". one stung my daughter the other day in the bathroom, she just looked up at her mom like "what the FUCK was that?!?!) but she didn't cry. unlike her father, who starts crying at the rumour of a bee- AGH!! i run like a palsied girl, flailing my panic-addled limbs in every direction "BEE! BEE! GET IT OFF OF MEE!!!!!!! AGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and my wife is like, "uh, honey, that's a piece of lint on your arm." and i go "ohhh... yeah, like, no DUH! ha ha ha i know that. i KNOW that. you have no appreciation for physical humor my dear, that's why you don't GET me. the French love me." this undeniable phobia comes from the fact that i was stung by a huge, massive, SINISTER black wasp when i was a kid. but WAIT, that was not enough, it's not e-fucking-nough that a gargantuen wasp had to attack me totally unprovoked with raw aggression, but it stung me INSIDE my nose. INSIDE my nose. it put the stinger IN my nose. do you know what that feels like? NO, you DON'T, cuz it's never happened to another human ever before in the history of noses. my one and only authentic contribution to human novelty in this lifetime is that i got speared by a wicked, nefarious wasp right on the inside of my nose. and buddy, it felt like getting hit with a #!@*$ sledge hammer. i use those random symbols as an expletive substitute because there are in fact no swear words sufficient to convey the shocking horror of the pain. one minute i was 12 years old and trying to start a lawnmower, the next i was in a time-less nexus passing a solar flare through the birth canal of my right nostril. MAMA! of course my face swelled up the size of a cantelope and i was the elephant boy, providing my family with an unending source of hilarity for the rest of the day. and like all such things that a occur in a family, it became an historical marker for us, in our little culture of five, it remains one of the indelible occasions that still has the power to elicit real belly laughs when it's brought up. like the time my brother inadvertantly confided to a complete stranger "man, i gotta take a shit". but that's a CHRISTMAS story, so i'm not going to tell it here. right now, it's fall, and when fall rolls around and the bees turn into berzerkers, i bristle with the memory of my encounter with wrong end of a wasp. and there's a moral to this tragedy. i like to think that i went through that unspeakable puncture so that YOU don't have to. people, please hear me. wasps and bees are evil. what's worse, they are unpredictable. their sole source of delight as incarnated beings is to punish the innocent and unsuspecting. honey? you want to bring up honey now, and the bees' impressive organizational skills, their amazing capacity for navigation? it's a RUSE! your biological naivete' is endearing, but perilous! i was once like you, trusting and curious about nature, until my love for all creatures was unceremoniously stabbed to death by you-know-what. but you do not have to be like me, you don't have to learn the way i did, as the victim of another treacherous insect- in fact an infinite number of deranged, furious insects which God stupidly gave the power of STINGERS but not a bit of conscience. because of this cruel perversion, we must remain ever vigilant. paranoia is our friend, the bees are our enemies.