If I Were a Cricket...(More Ramblings from Unemployment Land)

For two nights in a row I’ve heard crickets chirping madly outside my bedroom window.  After a bit, they start to grate on my nerves.  The way they communicate sounds almost like Morse Code.  One has a high-pitched chirp and the other responds with a very low-pitched chirp; or maybe it is just one cricket making high and low chirps.  Maybe it is a cricket talking to himself.  I wonder if crickets do that.  Maybe he is schizophrenic!  If humans can have mental diseases, why can’t crickets?

At times, this continuous chirping conversation can be annoying, but it does make me start thinking strange thoughts that then spiral of out control.  Could it be possible that crickets find us annoying?  Maybe they grow irritated after listening to a group of children playing outside in the summer dusk (who doesn't).  Crickets probably mark their calendars off, day by day, counting down the days until kids have to go back to school in the fall.  Then they have the outdoors to themselves again.  I would be annoyed if I was a cricket if I just wanted to jam with my cricket friends and a bunch of loud little rug rats were screaming and stepping on me.

Why stop at crickets?  I mean, if it’s possible that humans annoy crickets, then I’m sure we annoy all other insects and animals.

Sometimes I wish I was a cricket.  Think about it.  They live simply to exist.  They don’t worry about paying bills, job searching, exercise, money, if I could only win the lottery, etc.  They just eat and chirp and breed.  They don’t have to figure out their place in the world.  Ah, to be a cricket.  I have not realized my place in this world, and unemployment keeps me feeling out of sync, off track if you will.  Maybe I’m only off track by a quarter of an inch.  Incredibly frustrating to be so close to realizing my path, yet nothing seems to push me enough to get into that track.  How simple things would be...if I were a cricket.

--Fortuitous Observer