The Hissing Beetle

The other night I was picking up around the bathroom, which unfortunately doubles as a hallway into the backyard and is thus a local favorite with any of the numerous nasty flying things that are attracted to light, when I discovered a curiously large, greenish beetle hiding beneath some dirty clothing. Gingerly, I approached it with some scraps of cardboard, intending to release it back into the wild when it reared back on its hind legs and emitted a hissing sound "Kee! Kee! Kee!" (you can make this sound by touching your tongue to the bottom of your mouth and forcing air through it). With each hiss ("Kee! Kee! Kee!"), it rocked its body menacingly. Holy fuck! Needless to say, I jumped up and apparently made enough noise to send my room mate running towards the bathroom, fully expecting to have to pull a steak knife out of my body me or face some other similarly tragic ordeal. Thankfully, she captured and released the demon-bug while I cowered in another room. Alas, I have no photos, so identifying the vile pest has been challenging.

The Erotic Dragon Poster Table

When I first moved to LA I stayed with a high school friend who, at the time, was living in Burbank. I'll call him Greg, since that's his name. One day Greg comes home and tells me about this bizarre table he saw lying by the curb a little ways down the street. There was, apparently, a dragon painted on its surface. We go to inspect it and as promised, there is some elaborate dragon artwork on the table, though it turns out that it's little more than a large poster that had been affixed to its surface and then coated in some sort of finish to disguise this fact. No matter, the table itself was pretty cool: the legs and edges had been carved out in such a way as to suggest that it had been forged by the hands of fantastical creatures with wood from the ancient growth of an enchanted forest. Some nerd had probably spent most of the 80's playing Dungeons and Dragons on this thing's sacred surface.

But then I saw the nipple. It's difficult to explain why this is so, but it's not immediately obvious to onlookers that the dragon depicted on the table is in the process of engaging in some sort of sexual activity with another creature that looks not unlike a venus fly trap with breasts. If you've read this far you'll probably understand why I say that at this point we couldn't have not taken it home with us.

Fast forward several months and I'm living elsewhere and Greg is preparing to leave Southern California. Naturally, he bequeaths the Erotic Dragon Poster Table (as it has since become known) to myself and my room mates. We live in a crowded abode in North Hollywood: three humans and three dogs. And so, the table, being far too amazing to discard, was earmarked for storage in the garage behind the house--except that there was no storage space available--and the table languished for months and months in the sun out in the backyard while we promised ourselves repeatedly that we'd clear space for it soon.

Needless to say, the table's ancient magic was no defense against SoCal's cruel sun. The imagery rapidly faded to the point where it was hardly recognizable. At some point, two of the legs, which were already in need of repair, gave way. Eventually, my room mate decided to use its sad remains as a surface for painting.

I am not a religious man, but if there is one thing that I'm going to hell for, it's allowing the destruction of this thing of beauty. The Erotic Dragon Table sits there still, a miserable carcass and a testament to my inaction. It screams "please let me die," but neither my room mates nor I have the heart.

Is it just me or...

I confess that I had been drinking when I came upon this display in a Mrs. Fields at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, but the association that formed in my mind that night has persisted. Think of it as a sort of Rorschach inkblot test made out of cookie dough and icing. Do you see a delicious, over-sized confection or something far more sinister? In essence, how immature are you?