Yum

Okay, I'm just 48 years old, so this is only the second time in my life that I was able to sample one of life's culinary delights - cicada soup.

Yum, yum.

Doesn't that just sound delicious?

Creamy soup, with just a hint of crunchiness caused by the cicada's exoskeleton.

Just makes the mouth water, doesn't it?

Kinda stinks that they only come out every seventeen years, huh?

Okay, okay. I'm just kidding. Really I like to char-boil them. It makes the legs all crunchy and ...

Yeah, you got me again.

I've never eaten a cicada.

But I gotta tell you. When my cat eats them, he just looks ... well... okay, he looks stoned. Maybe that's why I want to try them. Cicada season for him is almost like breaking into a catnip factory. He rolls around, picking his teeth with their wing blades, crunching away like a kid with a bowl of Kix cereal, a stupid content look on his face.

I gotta get me some of that!

And the seagulls... yeah, seagulls ... I live dern near fifty miles from the nearest water, and there are seagulls swooping around, eating cicadas. They've fattened themselves so much, they almost look like white and gray soccer balls. You see them trying to attain liftoff, and they can barely get into the air. Not that they need to achieve airborne status to pick off cicadas, which have to be the stupidest bugs on the planet.

You'd think the cicadas would figure, "Hey, I don't have a mouth, a stinger, poison glands or even body odor, so I'd better lay low." Instead, they're off bumping into predators and calling attention to themselves with a racket louder than a chainsaw, "Hey, eat me! Eat me!"

Sure, they mean to say, "I'm randy... just want to have sex and die." But believe me, the birds all have selective hearing and they just hear the dinner bell. And not just birds, but almost all of the animals at Brookfield Zoo are on the Atkins diet from all the protein winging around.

So I'm sitting at my desk thinking, "hmmm, I wonder what they taste like."

No, not really, I'm wondering if I should have the third cup of coffee. But all of a sudden I hear a Shrek, er, a shriek, from the office. I bolt out there, and one of the office girls is jumping up and down, a panicked look on her face.

"There," she screamed. I followed her shaking finger as well as I could, and there it was. A cicada. Somehow it got into our hermetically-sealed office through the double doors, past the security-Joyce at the front and the stink from the bathroom where our MIS guy won't flush after peeing, and now it lay on our carpet, in a patch of sun... panting... its little seventeen year old body exhausted by its recent ordeal.

And I picked it up, noticing how much smaller it is than its brethren, the 13 year cicada and the common, see-it-all-time big and gray one.

It's more, can we say, 'bite-sized.'

Why, I could eat this in one little swallow. No need to bite into it.

Hmmmm.

Why don't I ... CRUNCH.

...

Nah, I put it in a planter and went to get some more coffee.



Norm
www.normcowie.com
The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness