i scream, you scream, all those goddamn bugs scream

It is a strange and startling thing, carrying your wired Jack Russell outside on a 3 a.m. bathroom run, scanning the yard with a flashlight, and being dive-bombed from beyond the arc of light by a dying cicada that comes screaming out of the sky.

I shared that snippet of wee-hours weirdness on Facebook a couple of weeks back, just minutes after it happened. It was an entirely true thing in my mind at that sleep-upended hour.

But truth is tricky, y’know? Because, you see, facts.

As it happens, I was not all that up on my cicada arcanum. A crucial detail in that initial post, I have since discovered, is inaccurate. Flat-out wrong, perhaps. Though let’s not put too fine a point on it.

Now, I recognize that I am likely alone in giving the tiniest portion of a rat’s ass about any of this, but understand, I am also just too vain to allow such considerations as audience desire to get in the way of whatever I might want to do anyway. So, here we are.

Anyway, truth must be preserved, yada, yada. Otherwise, that slippery slope, that culture-crumbling inflection point where we as a people begin willingly to accept nonsense as fact, that, e.g., McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets are, in fact, food, and not some pink slime slurry of pulverized poultry slough tinted with sawdust and seasoned heavily with salt and squandered dreams, and that the modern GOP isn’t trying to kill us all, simply because it can.

But first, this about my darling Jack Russell girl Marley, that little lightning-powered moron.

Our chaotic smaller pup has discovered, with the recent arrival of this fast-fading summer’s rare synchronized waves of adult cicadas emerging from the ground  – from their respective 13-17 years of nymphic root-sap gorging – that she cannot get enough of the tree-screeching slut-bugs.

Cicadas, and as it happens, also toads, drive Marley to blithering distraction. She will whimper endlessly at our glass back doors to be allowed again outside, to frantically check anew whatever spot she last confronted either of these somehow-offending creatures.

I believe Marley to be so enamored because, on some instinctual level, in the presence of either basically benign critter, she can flaunt all the toughness she inherently lacks, she who goes instantly small-dog worthless in the presence of any true potential resistance. I’m honestly not sure that the opossum that makes occasional after-midnight visits to our yard would not cause Marley to collapse in a paroxysm of fear, exposing her coward belly to the drooly, snarly, fellow fight-phony – that is, if the agitated marsupial ever possessed the gumption to venture down from atop our protecting fence.

I am, as an aside, forever removing toads from our back yard to safer locations, lest Marley accidentally wound or kill one in her hysterical efforts at attack. I do like me a toad, you see, and prefer the knobby little hoppers alive. (I’d also prefer they not piss on me whenever I am trying to save them. That’s just ungrateful behavior, goddammit.)

It was pretty much that same scenario when Marley met any of those surfacing cicadas. She would repeatedly lunge at them, barking like she’d cornered the devil himself, until she at last could find it in her pounding little heart to nab whatever specific twitchy bug in her mouth before immediately dropping it and … this actually would go on a number of times before, for all I know, Marley ultimately ate the majority of her inadvertently play-killed quarry when I wasn’t around. Because she swallows damn near any small, stationary anything she finds in our yard – acorn, bark, toadstool, twig, whatever.

How she is still alive at this point, I do not know.

At the outset of this multi mass-emergence, I actually retrieved several earth-covered cicadas directly from her quivering mouth, attempting then to place the inert fat things into safe locations, though I assume none ultimately survived the shock of Marley’s devoted attentions.

Now, with that belabored context behind us, let us again to my bullet-bug encounter those couple of weeks prior, bound as I was for Marley’s wee-hours backyard visit to hopefully stave off yet another befouling of our wood floors.

I have to carry this spastic pup outside each night, because if I allow her out on her own brainless recognizance, she tears off barking into the dark, out beyond the limited reach of our second-story floodlights, to race along the barricading fence line in typically defeated hopes of discovering something living and safely confrontable that she can stand off against in comic fury. Three in the fucking morning, bark, bark, bark! And me forever cringing, imagining newly awakened neighbors’ teeth gnashing away in angry heads.

So here again, I am toting Marley in one hand, a flashlight in the other, sweeping a wide circle of light across the back yard, to suss out the prospect of nocturnal visitors whose undiscovered presence will mean I’m next chasing a crazed Jack Russell across the yard in my stumbly sleepiness, attempting to dodge any recently deposited dog poop, and routinely failing. Three a.m. and shitty house slippers is no way to live.

As I’m scanning the fence horizon on this particular waning night, with a wild bundle of pulse-pumping puppy in my constraining arms, she forever yearning to be free, I am startled by a sudden horrific shrieking – there’s no other word for it, shrieking – escalating rapidly behind me. I start to turn just as something hard and small whaps my right shoulder, toppling then to the edge of my deck and out into the yard. A cicada, which I immediately assumed to be in the throes of death as it was twitching madly, and seemingly quite helplessly, letting off rounds of chirpy squealing.

My first thought was to get the buzzy thing off the ground, to provide it some dignity in its imminent death versus its meeting the unfortunate fate of an explosive lunatic canine bent on causing unnecessary additional grief in the manic bug’s final moments. Yet to pick up the cicada, which I knew was not a biting thing, I had first to put down my dog, which might potentially become a biting thing in the throes of adrenaline-amped enthusiasm. Because even there in my arms, muscle-tensed Marley was going utterly batshit over that thrashing bug.

I attempted to navigate these actions quickly, setting my damn fool canine to one side of me and darting inelegantly for the cicada, and somehow actually managing to beat Marley to it. My flailing around to scoop it up not only escalated its twitching, however, but set off its wild screaming again, freaking the ever-loving fuck out of me.

So to fully recap this ridiculous moment: I now have a wholly different spastic creature in one hand, and it is raising piercing blasts of towering noise you would never believe could come from something of such modest size.

I tried to set the overwrought insect into a nearby tall plant pot, but missed slightly in my aim, and then the scramble began all over again, me and Marley, same target, totally different objective. Once more, I was, inexplicably, a hair ahead of my frenzied pooch, though this time, I landed the cicada in the shielding pot. It shrieked for a few more seconds, then settled down slightly, to simply flail about, protected all around from Marley’s immediate advances.

In what now seems a baffling detail, I somehow convinced that little lit-fuse-bomb of a dog to do the business that had gotten me up to bring her outside in the first place, before forcefully ushering her back into the house, pitted against her blinders-focused need to not advance anew on the waning buzz coming from the planter, the seeming last sad throes of our unforseen kamikaze visitor.

I said some silly honorary something or other, “Sorry, little dude,” like that, you know, and in we went. I’m lousy for death. Damn near any death.

Cut to a few hours later, to just after daylight, and there I am again on bleary-eyed dog-duty, letting both our girls outside, and finding myself unable to not then go view nature’s little tragedy complete. I peered into the plant pot, even pushing aside the miniature boxwood a bit to get a better look. Nothing. No former cicada where there was absolutely supposed to be a small body that had thankfully expired in some semblance of dying-insect dignity.

I mean, WTF? Death is hardly known for being elusive.

Later, unable to let this go, as is my way, I found myself engaged in a little online investigation about cicadas, whose twilight-hour tree-shrieking has been, from afar, among my favorite natural sounds since I was a kid. Ocean waves, wind through palm fronds, distant rolling thunder, a driving downpour on a Key West tin roof and Southern summer concerts of shrill-ass tree bugs. Everybody has their own personal symphonies, I suppose.

I learned that it’s only the male cicadas that produce that mighty roar, which arises not from their throats, but out of some membrane playing itself like a demonic fiddle in their insect chests, where it can be amplified in some cicada species to a volume that, up close, is truly deafening.

As adult male cicadas take up residence in preferred trees, like the two adjacent, canopying white oaks in my own back yard, the bugs form big singing groups, if you will, on their brief adult lives’ singular mission to attract a snatch of female-cicada action, these desperate fellas’ ear-splitting pleas translating, I can only assume, to something like, “I’m here, already! I’m here! Somebody do me!”

That’s right, you lucky ladies! That daily droning din of hours-long begging means every guy in your immediate ecosystem is essentially throwing himself at your six seductive hooked feet. So it’s not like you’ve gotta overwork yourselves to meet that pressing biological imperative, now is it? It’s gonna end up being one of those damn fool loudmouths, in any case.

Even just now, as I’m sitting on my front porch reading this over, in a brief but welcome pause in this summer’s unprecedented heat, those needy winged bastards are getting their final waves of bang-me beseeching on in the many tall oaks common to this end of my neighborhood.

Adult males not only scream for love, however, but also when they feel threatened. (You’re welcome to go down the philosophical rabbit-hole that might connect those two impulses. Myself, no.)

And cicadas are seriously up against it, threat-wise. They are every small predatory critter’s favorite easy prey – that is, until every bird, bat, squirrel, snake, etc., has overeaten of the briefly everywhere-insects and then, it seems, bleah.

Turns out that scooping up a male cicada pretty much guarantees that same unsettling slutboy shriek, a defense mechanism in that instance designed to make whatever manner of devouring thing you might be back the hell away from the terrible clamor.

Dying adult male cicadas do indeed fall to the ground in their remaining days or weeks after mating, but they don’t go out screaming in their post-coital death drop. They just plummet. Plunk. Alas. Kaput.

My thinking now is that my surprise predawn meetup was due to some perceived existential threat from above, maybe from a bat out to score an easy after-midnight snack, with me unknowingly crossing the fleeing cicada’s frantic flight path, leaving it to tumble down, and to then thrash and bumble about, as it tried to right itself. It was not dying at all, but instead attempting, in full panic, to reorient itself, to get back airborne.

So, not screaming in death, but rather in an instinctual effort to stay the fuck alive.

When I scooped up the cicada in my efforts to protect it from my dingbat dog, I didn’t just reignite the insect’s penetrating shriek, to blast then like some hellish siren from my vibrating hand, but I also, let’s say, magnified one of the singularly strangest experiences I have ever had on my back porch in my PJs at just after 3 a.m.

Now, I realize it was a damn long walk for us to get here, to this conclusion, a call to action that I had never set out to make, much less gave you any sense might be coming. But here again, here we are.

If screaming somehow keeps you alive, or even if maybe you just believe that it does, no matter. In these profoundly troubled times, in these our own relatively short lives, go on, get your shriek on. Scream the very night and day away.

Whatever it takes to get yourself righted, and back in the fight. Back into the maddening, exhausting thrum of everything, that lately truly awful everything. Because this is no time to remain knocked down, thrashing helplessly on the ground.

So scream, you fuckers, my friends, you fools. Scream out, one and all. Scream.