Flies and Butter on the Rocks Or a Fly on the Tongue is Worth Two on the Screen

By manly pink scooter

Peter From South Oceanside reminded me of a heartwarming instance when he jokingly requested a cancellation to his OB Rag subscription on September 4, 2020 in a comment to my first post on this website.

One warm summer morning on the canyon’s edge I was on coyote watch while my coffee was abrewin’ and the bread was atoastin’.  I can spend several hours on the couch in the morning drinking coffee and perusing life and gazing out the picture window .  I’m so lazy sloths look down upon my habits. Turtles wonder if I ever will catch up.

On that wonderful morning I stepped into the kitchen for the toast & coffee, and I spotted a fly on the butter.

Someone in the household, I think it’s the Mother, has a strict rule regarding insects.  “No bugs in the house,” she insists.  Oftentimes I hear the patter of bare feet from someone’s children chase and corner a fly or a silverfish or a Brown Recluse, sometimes a Black Widow.  They remind me fondly of the cacophony a pack of coyotes makes during a kill in the canyon. These children are always barefoot because I don’t buy them shoes; there are simply too many of them.  When they ask about shoes, I simply tell them we are going to the beach.  This strategy works until they are about ten or eleven.

The fly on the butter on the butter dish on the counter had such a smug look on his face I was instantly disgusted. I was about to spread that butter on my toast, then chew it and swallow it.  But its little mandible was chewing, tiny dew drops of fly spit glistening in the morning sun, contaminating my butter.

Sometimes I am on fly duty when Mother and all the children have vacated the premises for the beach.  Armed with a fly swatter and a professional grade squirt bottle loaded with a special ordnance of  vinegar, water and soap, I shuffle about the house in my bunny slippers hunting elusive flying insects. Before duty I ensure there are about five chilled beer mugs in the freezer.  One can’t hunt while dehydrated. I use the bog ’em ‘n smack ’em strategy.  This home made soapy water paralytic makes them feel like they’re the Mummy slogging through quicksand.  The vinegar stings the eyes, makes them think about their transgression.

Even though the counter was littered with the remnants of breakfast for a marauding army of barefoot children, I spotted that culprit on the butter on the butter dish on the counter.  Weapon in hand,  I smacked that little punk.

Warm butter splattered the entire kitchen.

Even though I have children who throw wet food on the walls, it was evident butter had splattered the entire kitchen. I had to reholster the fly swatter, check the beer mug for splatter, chug-a-lug the beer then get working on clean-up.

After sweeping everything available into the dishwasher– glasses, cereal bowls, a yo-yo, coffee and beer mugs, fly swatter—I used the professional grade ordnance to remove butter scum from walls, ceiling, counter, refrigerator, cabinet doors, windows, floor and my bunny slippers.  Sloths and turtles would have been proud of me and my new temporary work ethic.

Once I had completed my several-levels-below professional cleaning, I noted that I had not found the little punk’s carcass.  Was he alive?  Had he escaped to irritate me again later that day?

I was thinking about the ramifications when the bus pulled up filled with my children, or someone’s children.  Sometimes I notice children around. Barefooted pitter-patter around the house.  A woman I know directs them to this or that task.  She may be the mother of some of them.  Or she just may be a woman who now shares my bed.  Tough to tell sometimes because when you have a fractal-designed personality like mine-  reality presents a daily question: Am I on magic mushrooms or not?

I forgot the fly.

Five or ten years later, when the teenagers were driving themselves barefooted to Old Man’s break to surf, I  spotted a mustachio on a picture of one of the children.  It sat atop the ‘fridge.  Closer inspection revealed that it was not a mustachio; it was splattered butter! And the top of the ‘fridge was thick in dust, debris, cooking grease; it looked like the haunches of a wild boar lollygagging in a Hawai’an mud pit.  I pried off all the picture frames of remotely familiar children with a flat bar.  I retrieved the vacuum, completely committed to killing the machine while trying to suck up boarfur.

Dead fly eyes peered up at me from a glob of butter. His smug expression gone. At last the fly carcass appears. Gobsmacked he was. In every tiny eye facet was a tiny X. His mandibles gaped open, crumbled, inflexible.  That little punk in his buttered mausoleum had gotten what he deserved, and I was instantly at peace.

If that moron in the Oval Office gets what he deserves, only thirty million idiot votes, then he should be gobsmacked at the loss.  Succinctly put, two little punks gobsmacked in one decade — that’s what I call a positive outcome.

manly pink scooter is obviously this OBcean’s nom de plume. Please don’t hold us responsible for the above rant and rave.