F-ing Flies!

I’m having flashbacks to the Amityville Horror.  Flies are everywhere!  It’s the time of the year, it’s the oddly wet weather, it’s the two equine fly magnets that would rather hang out by the house than graze the pasture on the hill.  When a door opens flies are lined up waiting to enter like New Yorkers on a subway platform.

I’m not entirely sure why they want to be in the house.  We put away our food, dispose of our waste and actively avoid accumulating rotting meat.  They’re exothermic (get body heat from their environment) so the air-conditioning should be uncomfortable.  We work to kill them, even Chubs chomps and eats them with bullfrog efficiency.  I’d think indoors would be as appealing to a house fly as the arctic is to humans.  While there are humans that go to the arctic on purpose, most of us would rather avoid it’s foodless, heatless, dangerous bastion of human discomfort.

Try this little experiment: excuse yourself from the dinner table to go to the bathroom, wait a few minutes, come back to the table and lightly touch someone else’s food.  You’ll discover touching stuff, especially other people’s food, is offensive.  That’s exactly what flies do; they land on everything, leaving remnants of whatever they’d just been on (maybe poop), spreading bacteria and other crud, some of which might be pathogenic.  Sure, it’s probably nothing that’ll hurt us, that’s not the point, it’s gross. 

Have you wondered how flies, with their tiny, toothless, jawless mouths eat?  They puke stomach juice onto their food, let it dissolve it into smaller bits and then suck it up like a kid eating a milkshake through a Freddie’s Custard straw.  Shooing them off of food doesn’t get their stomach juice off your sandwich, it just cuts their lunch off early.  I’d suggest an experiment similar to the previous paragraph’s but it might cause a relationship rift that would never heal. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson had a reputation for disrespecting personal space.  He’d get so close to a person when talking they’d agree to nearly anything to him out of their ‘no fly zone’.  Flies don’t care where they fly.  They buzz within millimeters of eyes, land on noses and dive-bomb my ears.  It creates a hostile environment and throws me into involuntary bodily flailing similar to grazing an electric fence or wandering into a spider web.  There’re almost 20,000 cubic feet within the restrains of my home, I occupy maybe ten of those and like the surrounding forty for comfort.  That leaves well over 99.5% of the volume of my house to be cruised by flies…but they want my less than half a percent.

I use an aggressive program of fly swatting, fly strips and profanity to keep the populations down, but I’m losing the battle.  The floor will be littered with the bodies of the defeated, I’ll sit back for a brief break only to be pulled from my rest by the gentle annoyance of a fly on my forehead.  I hate these f-ing flies!