snap 2

A lazy bumblebee leaves an invisible trail in the air while I watch it in terror.  I've always had a phobia of insects in general, and buzzing, stinging insects in particular.  It's not clear to me if there was a reason, an allergic reaction to a sting as a baby perhaps, but the fact is the sight of anything with more than four legs makes me freeze up.  Usually I can't even scream and can barely breathe.  It's horrible.  It's especially horrible when people think I'm actually brave because I can't scream, run away or flail my arms to protect myself.  It's worst when it's bees and wasps.  Everybody thinks it's just hilarious, how brave I am, how i stare them down, daring them to come at me.  For some reason spiders don't bother me so much, even when they're dangling by their silk threads from the ceiling, right at eye level.  There's just something more menacing about those bees.  Maybe part of it is the erratic way they fly.  You can never tell which way they're going to go.  They change direction randomly, without any warning at all.  It makes me very nervous not to be able to predict with any certainty when, where from, or even if they'll come at me.  Yeah, I think it's the randomness.  There's no reason for a bee to fly right into your face just as there's no reason for it to fly right past you.  It's like being constantly at risk for an attack.  Your defenses have to be up all the time and it's exhausting, you can get really tired of it really quickly.  Then, when you're tired, you're in danger of having unreasonable reactions.  You get violent, behave in an erratic, random manner yourself, trying to neutralize the randomness outside you, I suppose.  Mostly, you have to reestablish the pattern.  You have to take out the random, the arbitrary, and get back to the logical actions and reactions you've come to expect.  That's when you have to kill the bee.  It's not only the sting that threatens, it's its whole existence of unpredictability that knocks you off-balance and makes you feel like your whole world is collapsing.  That's when you have to take it out.  It all makes sense now.  I feel full of purpose, even righteousness.  My actions were all justified, even if it's hard for the police to believe somebody so slight and afraid of insects was able to take down a neighbor in such a way.  A neighbor who did nothing but cause trouble.  So yes, I swatted him like an insect.  And I had every reason to do it.