gnats and cats and quarks and thats

The little gnat flies are flying around my sink. You know, those miniscule fruit flies that appear from nowhere instantly once food rots or fruit ripens or coffee grounds stay moist too long. It’s like magic – there are no gnats nowhere, not a single one, yet place one ripe plum on the counter and there they are — immediately, with absolutely no time taken for little gnats to have sex and make little baby gnat maggot cocoons to be born and appear. These flies are not there, then they are there.

It’s simple Quantum Mathematics:
1 = no gnats.
2 = freshly purchased fruit brought in and set down.
3 = instant fruit flies.

It’s as if they teleport through Captain Jerk’s black-holed ego from Gnat Land to the immediacy at hand – rather like Quarks. Quarks make everything we are – protons and neutrons and hadrons and morons and so ons; and when they’ve done their job, they snap out of existence in our universe and go somewhere else. When they’re needed again to make more mass matter, they pop back into our Universe and do their dance.

Where do they go? Where do they come back from? How do they even know it’s time to return – do they get little transportational teleportation calls on cosmic Skype machines?

You know, if I were real and not just a half-second delayed lie my body/mind feeds my conscious me to make me think I’m the one actually doing all the stuff my mind/body decides and does on its own without even asking me, my head would hurt. Thank the Cosmic Joker I’m merely a late lie living in a three dimensional holographic representation of some two-dimensional master program somewhere just over our Event Horizon two bulging black holes past the Big Bang.

Anyway back to the gnats. Yesterday I’d left dirty dishes too long and the little flies flew all over and around and irritated me so much I washed the dishes and wiped up. I wanted to kill them, but Lady’s in her all-things-good-and-goodness-to-all-things phase of life and it would make her sad. Funny thing is she wasn’t even here but it would make me sad even if she didn’t know because I’d know she would have been sad had she known and I didn’t want to carry that weight within, so let the little flickers live.

This morning I come back from a too-long painful bicycle ride and slowly limp up three flights of stairs to our waiting cat who lets me know immediately she would like an extra treat of cheap processed water-diluted low-sodium thinly-sliced baked turkey breast.

I tell her no. She whines a bit but accepts the finality of my tone. I look at the sink. Frigging gnats flying around, even though there is no food, no dirty dishes, no fruit. I think once again about killing them before they teleport out of my reach, but instead I think about the pain in my leg that’s been there for years twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and is throbbing much much worse because I’ve just ridden too far on a bicycle whose seat is rusted too low for my long legs so I just bloody well hurt myself more peddling with bad leverage on bad leg and I turn to the cat and say “You know what? I’m going to give you your extra treat, because life’s too hard, and anyway you’ve already lived more than half your life so if too much pre-processed faux food is bad for you, that’s just the way it is.”

Gave her her food. Cleaned up the kitchen with bleach. She eats it all and comes in and thanks me, sits on the couch one cushion away, and we share the comfortable silence of affection.

And I will wait; I will see if the fricking fruit flies reappear in their gnatty attire.

If they do, I’ll give them a nod and say “Well done.”

I’ve got my wife to worry about — fuck the flies.

Besides, as that great socio-philosopher Groucho Marx once reMarxed, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”

Nam myoho renge kyo

[ PS – the flies are gone, but the cat decided she’d conned me out of an extra treat she knew she shouldn’t have gotten so spent the rest of the day whining and crying for yet another like some twisted Oliver Cat. No good deed goes unpunished, except maybe for the undead flies. ]