Wrong MC

Once upon a time a horrible villain double-crossed me, but it's sometimes hard for reasonable people to appreciate the gravity of the offense

True story. During the summer and early fall, my yard is full of glorious bumbling bic lighters with wings. Sphecius speciosus, family Bembicinae. It means beautiful buzzing wasp. You might know them as cicada killers. They are formidable looking insects, for sure, but unless you’re a cicada, a pile of dirt, or a drop of nectar, then you face no danger from them. Only the females can sting, and they just simply … don’t. Except for cicadas, which are their prey.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cicadas, I don’t want them to be killed per se, but cicada killers are really important to keeping cicada populations under control, especially during the times of periodical cicada surges. They are also pollinators, so if you want humans to be able to grow food in future years, and if you want there to be flowers, and if you want, you know, generally, for LIFE to exist, then you should accept the fact that pollinators are essential workers and we should never kill them.

Stepping off my eco-friendly soapbox, I return to the main thread. Every year in Philly the cicada killers arrive, fly around chaotically, terrify children, entertain the cats, dig little mounds and trails in the garden, and go about their buzzy lives. If you’re truly unfortunatefortunate, you may even get to see one toting a paralyzed adult cicada up a tree. They do this so that they can gain enough altitude to fly it all the way back to their nest, because they are not super competent flyers, and the cicadas are typically 1.5-2x the weight of the lady cicada killer herself.

But I’m not here to give you an entomology lesson. I’m here to give you some character building about myself, because to say that I love bugs comes nowhere near justice to the truth, and to say that cicadas are kind of my thing is an understatement of shambolic proportions, and to say that cicada killers are also my thing - along with every other marginalized animal with fantastical properties and powers that no one appreciates - would still not faithfully convey how deep and fierce my love of these creatures goes. Like, I will seriously cut a bitch before I let someone harm an arthropod on my property.

I could spend a lot of this story talking about how extraordinary these wasps are, but either you already know that, or you don’t and you don’t care, or you do care, but maybe you’ll just take my word for it. Whichever way it goes, I don’t need you to join me in this particular enthusiasm, but I do think that in the end, we’ll all at least agree that what my neighbor did was a fucking atrocity.

One day as I was pulling out of my driveway, she saw me from her yard and started waving frantically. I paused and rolled down my window.

Neighbor: “Have you seen all these giant striped hornets flying around?”

Me: “Yes, they are cicada killers. They are actually wasps, not hornets.”

Neighbor: “They’re everywhere. Where are they coming from?”

Me: “They are always around. They are higher in numbers this year because of the 17-year cicadas. In fact, I have a nest under my porch.”

Neighbor: “Well, I need you to destroy the nest under your porch.”

Record scratch. Brief disbelieving stare.

Me: “I am not going to do that.”

Neighbor: “We have to get rid of them.”

Me: “We don’t have to get rid of them. They are harmless to people. They don’t sting. They’re beneficial to the environment.”

Neighbor: “But they’re scary!”

Me: “They’re harmless. Destroying one nest is not going to change anything anyway.”

Neighbor: “But we need to control their populations. I have some borax I can give you, you can just sprinkle it onto the nest and it will kill them. Or I can do it for you if you want.”

Dear readers, you may be surprised to know that occasionally, I am capable of restraint, civility, and keeping my fury to myself in the interest of community peace. So rather than verbally assassinate her in that moment, I decided to simply decline and move along. I politely expressed that I was not willing to destroy nests or sprinkle poison around my house, and that I had to be on my way or I would be late.

Naturally, as soon as I turned onto the street, I called my husband to howl my incandescent rage share the story with him. MINUTES LATER, he sent me a screenshot:

She CONTACTED MY HUSBAND immediately after I told her I would not be putting poison in my yard or killing any creatures.

I have so many questions.

Did she think he would agree to something like that without talking to me? Did she think that I wouldn’t find out she contacted him after I told her no? Did she think he would cop some kind of authority over the situation, à la “I’m the man so I’ll decide what we do and don’t murder under our house?” Did she think her opinion about what should happen in our yard was going to hold more weight with him than mine?

Did she think that I was the kind of person who would ever forget this happened?

It’s been a few years now since this whole thing went down, and I have occasionally tried to explain to other people the volume of my vitriol about it, which, in mathematical terms, is actually quite simple:

V ≈ 1.332 × 10⁹ km³

(in other words, approximately the volume of Earth’s combined oceans)

But in language and relational concepts, I always seem to lose people, and I don’t have quite the right words. On its surface, it seems like a clash of values:

My values: respect for living organisms, coexistence with nature, ecological stewardship, favoring rational judgment instead of “they’re scary” emotional reactions

Her values: control, comfort, elimination of “scary” things

But in reality, those aren’t really values so much as a far-reaching rationalization for trying to bend reality to be something that’s easier, tidier, and more sanitized.

Friends, those of you who have been with me a little while know that obsessing over this type of insidious whitewashing of reality is pretty much my entire existential occupation. She just happened to step on it in the most mythic way possible, LITERALLY THREATENING ALL OF THE QUIET ANIMALS.

Going back to this story’s title, if you’re scratching your head now wondering where the hell that came from, it’s because I’ve had “The Mask” by the Fugees in my head all day and I was thinking about this story today, wishing I could go back in time and say to her in the moment, “Helllllllll no siree, WRONG MC!”

There’s no fucking way I’d ever borax harmless pollinators under my porch.