Listening to field recordings of the insane ramblings of streetside preachers is one way to ensure that you never have a good night's sleep again. Maybe it's the bugs living inside youor eardrums, maybe it's delusional parasitosis, or maybe it's just the fact that there are actual people out there in this world who believe for sure that the universe is crashing down on them in the next few hours and it's imperative that YOU LISTEN, right now, LISTEN, and try to stop it all from happening. The point is, you can't LISTEN. YOU can't listen because there isn't really anyone talking there at all. The street preacher with the microphone on the soapbox isn't there, he's in your head, he's YOU, and you can't listen to him. He's in your head, in your brain, scuttling through veins and juming across synapses and sliding down dendrites.

There are bugs crawling all over me right now. Itching me, digging into my skin, laying eggs underneath my dermis, feeding on the nutrients in my blood. It's my house. They're all over the place. My housemate is moving out because they're getting into his lungs and he has to sleep on the couch because his room might be the epicenter of the infestation. I thought it was a coincidence that he was suffering from some kind of airborne allergen at the same time that I was itching all over and my girlfriend was getting disturbing bug bites in her own bed. But it isn't a coincidence at all. The same bug that is eating through my housemate's alveoli is sucking the blood through my arms, legs, neck, forehead. My other housemate's cock and balls are next.

Today on my bike ride home from school, I rode through a few patch of dark misty air, thick with swarming gnats. When I got through them I looked at the front of my shirt, and it was crawling with bugs, even as the 20 mph wind attacked every fold and crevice in my shirt. Millimeter-sized pests, 20 of them, crawling around, stuck to me. Biting me? Maybe. This really happened. It was real.

When I came home I stripped off all my clothes and burned them unceremoniously in a pit that I had dug in my backyard six weeks ago for a totally different purpose. Unfortunately it is now unusable and I shall have to dig another one... hopefully the weather stays nice because once it gets cold the ground will start getting harder and my fingernails won't be able to handle breaking apart the tough clods as easily as they do when it's soft.

But is that what the man on the side of the road is talking about when he says a plague is coming to take us all? God decided to start small. A bed bug or mosquito today, locusts tomorrow, polar bear-sized earwigs next week.

The next step after burning my entire wardrobe is to wash my sheets 12 times and throw my bed out. Then repaint my skin so it resembles something human again, instead of twisted redding flesh.

So.

As you can see, I have to figure out what's eating me. So to speak.

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