Bug Zapper Blues

 

Recently, I bought a bug zapper because of an especially large mosquito and gnat population in my backyard. I plugged it in and hung it on my back deck near my recently installed hammock and waited around for some action.

It didn't take long before I had my first customer. I'll never know who he was because his carcass was vaporized in a giant electric arc that made a very loud snap. It sounded like a BB hitting window glass. Not enough to break it, but enough to make someone in the house look up from their book.

Soon, it was popping, crackling and snapping, but much louder than breakfast cereal. Think more like an arc welder in a room full of Tesla coils. I was impressed by the variety of different sounds were being emitted, from single snaps to rapid fire peals of snappity-snap-snap snip-snap--POP! 

I got up to view this phenomenon up close, but that's when I was struck with the magnitude of the atrocity that I was perpetrating on my little backyard ecosystem. There was a huge variety of winged little critters, most of which would never think of biting a human, all circling, rapturously, this source of light. This wonderful attraction that called to them, siren-like, was a death-trap. 

I thought of the 70s dystopian future movie Logan's Run, where, at the age of 30, everyone had to submit to voluntary euthanasia to keep society from ever having to experience the ugliness of aging and degeneration. When it was their time, they would be led willingly into this room where they would slowly levitate off the floor in some kind of ascension ritual. 

But really they were just being drawn up to the ceiling where they would be killed by some kind of explosive flares or lasers being fired at them, causing them to burn up like fireworks. 

These little night insects were being manipulated by me in a similar fashion, and part of me is not OK being the Lord of Death for flies.

I watched as a perfectly healthy housefly walked around the bottom of the machine, oblivious to the danger that was millimeters from ending his life. I cringed in anticipation. I knew there was going to be a substantial noise, but I wasn't prepared for what I heard. 

It started as a crack, like chalk striking a chalkboard, but then it turned into a series of snaps, followed by a squeaky hinge sound that faded into a high pitch scream. A tiny insect soul, screaming out before annihilation. 

I was standing close enough to the machine to feel the vibrations of electricity ripping through the fly's body, releasing the entirety of its fly energy in a scream-like sizzle that went right through me, leaving a queasy feeling in my stomach as it passed.

I left it on all night, and from inside the house, I could hear the occasional snap or skritch of a bug meeting its demise, but from a distance, it was not as traumatizing. Still, after a couple of days of continuous insect mass murder, I relented, and for now, it will remain off until such time as I am out there actively being assaulted by mosquitoes.