June Bug - Bah Humble Bug!

Grant walks through the front door on April 1, casually reaches up above his right ear and pulls a small, six spiky-legged critter from his hair with his fingers and tosses the formerly follicley-embedded rider back out into the nighttime air before quickly closing the door.  "First June Bug of the year!" Grant announces and then saunters into the kitchen to search for fresh baked desserts.

Grant has always been a gallant lad.  One of his first highly prized skills was "June Bug Wrangler" for the Suneson household.  From an early age he was most helpful in catching the hordes of June Bugs that would inevitably scuttle into the house anytime an outside door was opened during the Spring evening.  Grant's older sister, while not terrified of the bumbling insects, did not care to deal with them and was distinctly uncomfortable in sharing this aspect of nature inside the home.  Gallant Grant would quickly hop around scooping up the hapless beetles as they buzzed upon their backs on the kitchen floor, relieving his sister and his mother, as he dispatched them back out of doors.  This time of year the June Bugs manifest themselves in Biblical proportions - "a cast of thousands" that would make Cecil B. De Mill proud.  The round brown l'il buggers are attracted to the porch light as well as all windows that are lit from inside, massing on the glass and screens, and then disappearing by morning; only to return over the next several nights.  Even if you avoided our patio and porch, you know they are out there just by the sound of hundreds of June Bugs thumping into the windows, making a constant rapping upon the glass, similar to the sound of a small hail storm - only the plinking and plunking is from insects rather than ice.

Now I do respect Nature, maybe even more than the next guy.  I think we can all respect the power of a tsunami, an earthquake, tornadoes and their ilk of  powerful disaster forces.  But I can also respect the ordinary life forces that mysteriously spawn migrations of the flitting, light Monarch butterfly to the behemoth leviathan Grey Whale; my resepct extends to the embedded instincts of birds to weave together intricate nests and beavers to build dams that only dynamite can set asunder. I can even grudgingly respect the tenacity of weeds growing from small fissures in blistering hot pavement.  And even among the seemingly simple and humble forms of life, I marvel at the behavior of ant colonies to set up  ant cemeteries and ant dumps far from the living colony.  I marvel at the division of labor among bees and the ability of bees to dance and communicate the location of new food sources to their hive by symbolic moves.  Who teaches these small creatures that posses not a mind but a mere tangle of ganglia the intricacies of communal civilization and complex communication and behavior?  I have to not only respect the power displayed in this entomological world, but be in true awe.

BUT, though it may be politically incorrect to assert such judgement, I can not respect the June Bug.  They are so dumb.  They have wings, but they can barely fly; their trajectory is more like a launch than a purposed flight.  And launch they do, a random fling, usually into a wall or into the window pane.  Their motto,  "No pane, No gain".  They seem to get nowhere with their short flights.  And when they fall back to earth, they almost always land on their backs.  What purpose do these little brown bombers serve? - Other than to be subject of ethnic slurs and jokes among all the other insects.  Ladybug moms around the world scold their hyperactive, unfocused children by saying "Y'all are acting like a bunch of June Bugs! Now straighten up and fly right!" 

In all Creation is there anything less stupid than the humble June Bug?

Rumble, Fumble, Tumble
Comes a hurling June Bug, oh so humble.
With flurious stubby wings all flapping,
Your banging soreheads makes a rapping,
softly tapping, tapping at my window pane.

Poor dumb June bug, gifted with wing
Yet your flight is a most random thing.
Dimmest wit of all creation’s bugs,
Lacking the grace of a falling lug.

From Springtime darkness, you launch toward the light
Smacking my window makes a painfully short flight.
Plainly Ungainly,
Your beetle body’s constant battering continues so inanely.

Splat!  June bug headlong crashes into my lit window glass,
The last thing to go through your beady mind?
– Must’ve been your ass.