RACKING UP THE POINTS

As anyone I went to school with will tell you, I am not a competitive person.  There is not one bone in my body that cares whether someone can else hit a baseball better than me (they all can), jump over a high jump bar better than I can (everyone can), or run faster than I can (again ... ).   This fact has a two part explanation – firstly that I was born with a most uncoordinated, clumsy body, and secondly that this body is equipped with a mind quite unconcerned that 97.2% of other humans on the planet can do anything athletic better than it can. 

The closest thing to exercise I take on is walking the dog.  He never judges me, all he wants is the company and I can do that at any speed I choose.

Also, I do not possess a killer’s instinct.  There are plenty of hunters in this family but I am not interested in going out and shooting anything ... not gophers, not skunks, not even paper targets.  If this is a defect then just add it to my list.

On the other hand, I do enjoy a challenge.  Not one like a ‘can I get this basketball into the net’ kind of challenge – I mean, who wants to fail miserably with a crowd watching your every move?  I’m more of a solitary game player.  Give me a round or two of Tetris or computer Mah-jong instead.  I can waste all kinds of time matching up shapes for no good reason – it must be the music and sound effects that reward my psyche.  Heaven knows I don’t pay any attention to the points that I’m getting and I certainly never share my score with my friends on Face book.  If they’ve known me for any length of time at all they already pity me my dismal gaming skills.  I do have some pride.

This time of year, though, these traits of mine - the sports ineptitude and the competitive indifference - take a wonky turn and I suddenly have a need to rack up points that I am quite prepared to brag about.

It’s ‘Invasion of the Flies’ season.  Oh yes, I know that there have been flies all summer long; the horse flies that bite me when I’m working in the garden, the nuisance ones that buzz around my face when I’m mowing the grass, and the hordes that like to hang out on the deck when I barbeque, but as annoying as these insects are at least they possess meagre intelligence (well, as much as their two brain cells can muster) and follow patterns of predictable behavior. 

Come mid September flying insects are down to one misfiring brain cell possibly caused by age-related dementia, hypothermia, or spending too much time where the apples are fermenting in the back yard.  What this means is that they have morphed from a commonplace annoyance to a plague of hideous, creepy, brain dead, zombie-like creatures who are too stupid to continue living and too dumb to die.  And there are thousands of them.

Perhaps it’s my passionate hatred for them that brings out the killer in me.

At any rate I play this game each fall. Multiple times per day I fire up my vacuum cleaner and go hunting.  One would think that these bumbling idiots would be easy marks, but they are not.  Just like it’s the chronic drunk driver who never seems to get caught, these guys are crazily adept at wobble-flying out of reach in the nick of time.  Sucking them up to their doom is my favorite sport.

So much so that I have devised a scoring system for “kills”:  it’s 5 points for catching them on a window surface (for some reason they just don’t see you coming while they’re on glass), 15 points for a capture on a wall, 20 on a horizontal surface such a table or counter, and a full 50 if I can catch them in flight (it’s the drunk driver thing – you just can’t guess their next move).

It’s been ten days since the season opened.  My score as of this morning is 5,070.  I guess I like my sports to have an actual purpose.