if there’s one thing wrong about a very hot day, it’s that they picked a hell of a time to make it also garbage day in my neighbourhood. egad, the smell of compressed diapers, fish entrails, and rancid beef drifted from a coagulated mixture of liquid on the street by my house. this made it an extremely trying effort for me to walk home down the scarcely shaded road. the mildly cool breeze picked up the pungent odor of “garbage juice” and carried it past houses and cars and tired bodies coming home from school.

i spied insects crawling out of overturned, empty rubbermaid containers on the outskirts of people’s front yards. it seems mysterious to me that these cockroaches, these flies, these annoying little creatures of both under the soil and under your bed will survive the impending nuclear war waged among the parasites known as humans. when we finally go through with our sad verbal attempts at bombing the smithereens out of china and usa and wherever else the light of day reaches, humans will cease to exist and the insect shall inherit the earth.

oh, these crawly unknown organisms which we can’t wait to squish are the most adaptable it seems. they have the survival instinct and capacity to live on after we kill ourselves in said war. did you know a family of roaches can live off the glue on the back of a postage stamp for a month? did you know a fly can survive just by eating the disgusting residue left on a kitchen counter by a man’s simple fingerprint? did you know there are approximately six insects legs in every chocolate bar? (ok, the last one didn’t fit the context of adaptation, but it’s still a shocking fact.)

when we humans primp and clean ourselves, loathing insects and eating our sophisticated foods, we will always, always find it surprising that we are the least adaptable creatures on the planet. instead of learning how to survive in our given environments, we kill forests and animal habitats in order to build shelters and control the weather with our great scientific machines. instead of humbly passing on as an elderly member of the human race, we begin to cheat death with strange medicine and clone ourselves repeatedly like sheep and continue to simply exist indefinitely.

to live forever is human; to live and die, divine.