After a weekend that consisted of a trip to Nashville for the Full Moon Tattoo and Horror Festival, finishing the Soul Pancake book and finally seeing the original Tron – I think it’s time to get back to productivity mode and present part 01 of my “expert essay” assignment I have given the name “One With the Bee.” Enjoy:

After weeks of being trapped inside my house, I finally decided to go full force up against my enemy. My armor consisted of Doc Martin low top boots, khaki pants and a paint / oil stained, white t-shirt. My arsenal consisted of a broom that was too long for this job and a full can of wasp and hornet spray, I was ready to take on the male carpenter bee. My fear of bees had kept me on the other side of my back door, watching the terrifying beast hovering over the railing of our back deck. Back and forth, over and back again, the hideous creature flew, all the while looking into my eyes, smelling my fear.

Now consider how terrifying it is for someone who is afraid of bees anyway to see the horrible bee going back and forth, never landing, often looking at you and buzzing close to your head when you go outside! Why wouldn’t that satanic buzzing ball of terror land on anything? I would reach outside from time to time and try to spray it in mid air, but it was too fast and too coordinated for my poor aim. For days it defeated me, laughing at me – daring me to come out and agitate it a little more. Well this day was different because I studied carpenter bees all day at work and I knew that the yellow-faced, never-landing psycho that was buzzing around my back porch was a male, and male carpenter bees do not have stingers.

I was suddenly a tough guy.

I took off onto the back porch and began swinging the broom wildly trying to knock down the bee in mid-flight to no avail. He would fly around to the top of the house, then straight down like a spider, only behind me. I’d hear it’s terrible buzz behind my head before swinging around like a mad man, frantically throwing the head of the broom around in the air – again, never touching the bee. I gave up and went back inside.

This back and forth game went on for days before the females finally started to emerge from the holes they had drilled into my deck the previous summer. Sleepy and uncoordinated from three seasons of rest left the females uneasy and clumsy as they would crawl along the wood and try to find the hole from which they emerged. This made them easy targets for the wasp and hornet spray, sending them to the ground, legs kicking like a newborn baby only, you know – dying. The males followed suit, becoming a little groggy from time to time, allowing them to finally get hit with my broom and eventually with my spray.

While I hadn’t defeated all of the bees, there were relatively few flying around after about three weeks of fighting. I took this time to do something I should have done last year and filled in their holes with wood putty. I was a little worried about doing so since they tore through three separate applications of duct tape on their holes last year, but it’s been quite some time now since the holes were filled in and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of those horrific beings. It took some time, but all of the research and effort finally paid off. My wife joked with me and said I had to “become one with the carpenter bee” before I could defeat it. To an extent she was correct.

//End part 01

Also, here are some snaps from this weekend’s festivities in Nashville. I got to meet Malcolm McDowell – Alex, for those who do not know, from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, one of my favorite pieces of art. We picked up a nice print from artist Nathan Thomas Milliner (www.rebelrouserart.com) of A Clockwork Orange inspired art that I had autographed by Malcolm as well as this beautiful collage illustration inspired by Dario Argento’s Suspiria by artist Joel Robinson (www.artpusher.net). NOT PICTURED: Cannibal Holocaust inspired art, also from Joel: