Context #1: Why I Hate Crickets
In the Summer of 2012, there was a drought in Oklahoma. It was so dry that a certain parasite could not survive. Said parasite usually eats many, many cricket eggs in the early summer, but this year, all the crickets hatched in late summer. When I arrived on campus to begin my senior year of college, and on into the fall semester, basically until it got cold enough to freeze, I learned firsthand what a “plague” of insects is like. There were so many of them on the sidewalks that one could not physically avoid crunching them while walking or biking across campus. They swarmed around street lights at night. They somehow came into apartments through air vents. And the smell of their rotting corpses wafted across campus from the mass graves that happened to be created each time exterminators came through with pesticides.
One evening….