The Yellow Jacket

Today I went out of the office to smoke a cigarette at around 3:00 pm, as is my wont, whatever the fuck a wont is. Certainly it's my habit, and thank god, really, that I smoke, because otherwise whole weather systems would pass me by, locked in hundreds of feet of solid concrete and mineral specimens as I am. I mean, Armageddon may have come and gone by the time I emerge from the office: I'll never know. So I spend a lot of time in the Rhino courtyard, smoking alone, feeling every inch the social pariah and getting on first name terms with the cardinal family and the mysterious worms that mysteriously emerge from solid pavement every time it rains and then, of course, not mysteriously at all, die horrible deaths at the hands of the cardinal family. Nature: it is a mystery. Mmmmm hmmm.

And today it was even more of a mystery than usual, because I smoked my 3:00 cigarette, bid a wistful goodbye to daylight and the sky, and went back inside to chop membership forms at which point I became hideously aware that something large and angry was buzzing around in my hair. "help!" I called softly from the kitchen, as I tried to brush it out. "Help! HELP!!" and my coworker finally heard my pleas and ran out to help me. Sure enough, yellow jacket. She got it out of my hair without either of us being stung, utterly amazingly, and proceeded to stamp it into oblivion with extreme prejudice while I waxed eloquent equally with thanks and with the still bitter memory of the yellow jacket in a soda can who stung me on the upper lip in 7th grade. That sting, positioned directly in the center of my lip, caused it to swell up to National Geographic proportions. For several days. In which my unfeeling mother forced me to go to school.

That was horribly cruel and I'd never do such a thing to my own kids, unless, of course, they were really getting on my nerves. Heh. But I'm over it though. Really. I mean, seriously, I'm so over it.