What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted? When the predator becomes the prey? What happens when the eater becomes the eaten? Vacation at the beach is a time of great food — of crab cakes and fajitas and Korean-Style Marinated Skirt Steak with Scallions and Warm Tortillas (I made that one) and lots of ice cream and more crab cakes, please. And then I took an ill-advised midnight trip to the sandy beach, away from immediate sources of light, to see the Perseid meteor shower. I did not want to be bitten by insects, so I wore a long-sleeve shirt and long pants, plus shoes and socks.
But that left my wrists and hands exposed. Reader, I was bitten. I can laugh off a bite or two.
Or even three or four. But I cannot laugh off 44 insect bites on my right hand and 28 on my left. Neither, apparently, can I learn a lesson.
Somehow, two nights later, I received another nine bites more or less around my left ankle and 12 more or less around the right. I'll save you the math. That's a total of 93 insect bites.
The ones on the legs are larger than the ones on the hands, incidentally, so I assume it was two different types of insects that were doing the biting. They itched like mad. The itching came in waves.
I wouldn't notice a thing, and then all of a sudden the torment would start. All the bites on my hands or my legs would begin to itch furiously, all at the same time. It was torture, but I couldn't get mad.
This is what eating is all about. We all eat to live. Some of us also li.
