I hate mosquitoes! I've hated them ever since I was a child, when I used to wake up in the village with so-called watery eyelids, so swollen from bites that I couldn't see. It will be over by noon, the elders would say, possibly smearing it with brandy, which made their eyes burn even more. A time of poverty and reconstruction, who would still be dealing with insects then.
I froze them even more one summer I spent on the ground floor of the "Patrice Lumumba" Student Dormitory, when swarms from the star forests moved into the corners of my and all the other rooms. There were also completely sleepless nights, but in vain, I did not manage to defend myself. And I experienced that one baja was staring at my legs for a very long time and conspicuously. Not that they weren't worth looking at, but the reason was of a completely different nature than what I would have liked, and he had, to put it mildly, a frightened expression on his face. "It's not contagious, it's from mosquitoes," I somehow managed to blurt out. Until the end of the summer, I dressed as if I were a member of some strict religious community, covered my arms and legs, and avoided the so-called baju in a wide circle.
Little by little, the years of mosquito-free prosperity arrived, mosquitoes were dusted from the sky and the ground. And various chemicals arrived in our region, which, as the season started, I carried with me as valuables, always and everywhere. It shouldn't be a bad thing, if someone overtakes after the dusting action.
Then came this so-called summer. Tent summer, if we will be honest, but kind, and by God, also kind according to this vermin. Not only nature and climate were favorable for them to grow and thrive. And the new government showed a lot of understanding for the mosquito population. They are left alone to grow and multiply, as much as they can and as much as the dear creator has determined for them in monsoon time, that is, to infinity. It's not that there aren't still all those various cars and raids, but it's all become expensive, as if it's made from musk beef or some special scent essence.
They attack me outside, they attack me inside, they attack me when I'm awake, and worst of all, they attack me when I close my eyes for a little while. The sound of buzzing around the head of at least one wakes me up without fail. Then I hit myself frantically in the dark, wherever it seems to me that the source of the sound is close, I paw at my forehead and hair, slap and some serious slap, but nothing, I have never found one slapped on the skin. Just blister to blister.
I also noticed spiders, they say that they are the natural enemies of mosquitoes. I didn't touch the cobwebs for two months, I just monitored. The spiders are all very small and thin, and I did not find a single entangled insect in the web. Later I see, there are no spiders either, they moved on in search of some more peaceful bugs for food. During one of the recent sleepless nights, I decided to try a do-it-yourself trap, which has been circulating on the Internet since spring. I know, I know, from the beginning it looks like those recipes for various "sanction" cakes, but desperation takes its toll. Plus the recommendation, that it is an ecological trap and that the mosquitoes will end almost without suffering. Let's be human even though we are eaten, I thought and reached for the tool.
The recipe is actually alchemically precise - 50 grams of yellow sugar (why yellow sugar, I think and change it to white, cheaper), and 10 grams of yeast (why exactly 10, I think and roll out a quarter of a cube of fresh), shake it, which my mother would she said. Well, the water is heated, and then cooled, as if the work would not work hot from the water heater... Everything like that, fine and precise. I cut a plastic bottle in half with my feet, the installation I'm watching on the Internet is constantly in front of my eyes. I shake the ingredients, instead of black tape, (black, because mosquitoes like the color black), I wrap my installation with an old black silk jumpsuit. It won't take long for me to be decorated like this anyway. And, now the yeast will make carbon dioxide, and the mosquitoes, attracted by the blackness and the smell, will recklessly fly into that installation and choke on the poisonous gases, until they finally sink into the infernal sweet mixture. Internet pictures of half plastic bottles full of battered swarms give me very genocidal urges. Every now and then I stare at my well of wishes, and much more often I still slap my bare hands. A few capital specimens attack my fingers on the black keyboard even though the budding yeast is standing right next to it.
"Offered who honored," I think furiously. I wander sleepily around the house half the night, I move that installation from one place to another, I leave it next to the headboard, as it were, but it's empty. In the morning, I run to see the catch as if I had placed a bucket somewhere on the blue sea, so I look forward to catching fish. Some two miserable black dots are visible in the screaming yeast, they don't even look like mosquitoes, more like small kitchen moths with whom I also live in peaceful coexistence. So, you still have to stick to the recipe, contrary to your knowledge of food and making yeast dough. The next evening, I prepare a new soup for them, yellow sugar exactly in the gram and everything in order... Something was caught, one... I was bitten by one hundred and one, wherever it went. Mosquitoes have become organized, smart, hard working... everything we are not. It never occurred to him to enter an unknown black well wrapped in seductive silk, where carbon dioxide simmers at the bottom, and drown carelessly. These are not people who rush around and think that everything written on the Internet is just the truth. I surrendered, eco-friendly means will be replaced by heavy chemicals. Raid will become my best friend again.
Why is all this suffering a time of enjoyment at all, the wise will ask. Firstly, because the feeling when you get rid of the itch, even temporarily, is indescribable, secondly, because I am looking forward to the pain that I will still do with chemistry or life force. And thirdly... I somehow remembered an ancient joke from Stalinist Russia. The story goes that the only toilet paper, emery grit no. 50, called Stalin's revenge, and that he was thus punishing an ungrateful paradise. Well, it somehow occurred to me in my shallow mind that this and our current overall itch-suffering is from accumulated, unsprayed mosquitoes, for someone it can be a petty mischief and a time of enjoyment while watching us, ungrateful and idle as we are, scratching and scratching like freak out.
