What’s messed up of butterflies is everything. Never let anyone try to tell at you that a butterfly is beautiful, because butterflies are just full-on lies a moth tries to tell you. Let me explain.
A of all, a moth is hands-up-and-back-down again the worst actual bug there is. Worse than spiders, which are bugs and don’t let anyone tell you different, worse than worms that swim inside your leg from the Amazon and then hatch eggs on you in that episode of Grey’s Anatomy, worse than a clacking nest of cockroaches straight up flying at your nose, typing out your name in Morse code with the clacking of their hard-ass wings. I would rather wear a wedding dress made of lightly furred baby wolf spiders, all of which were just starting to wake up and open their eyes, than even be in the same room as a moth for a second. A moth is a flying nightmare dressed like a ghost, and I say to heckfuck with all of them.
We’ve got to finish addressing why a moth is so bad before I explain to you why fuck butterflies, so let me lay it outworth for you:
1. A moth flies like a determined blind gibbet. It’s fucked up how a moth flies in a million different directions at once, and you can hear the light flutter of its wings slushfing against each other as it skids wildly from one surface to the next. A moth is always two seconds away from flying mindlessly into your hair, where it will get tangled for a hundred percent of forever, and it will always flap madly against your neck, and it will never get out.
2. A moth folds its wings back like a fighter jet when it lands on the wall. Either that or it spreads them out like a freaky mockery of the Crucifixion. Both of those positions are too much planning from a bug. Why’s it only ever in one of two positions? A: EERILY STILL. B: MOVING AS MUCH AS ANYTHING HAS EVER MOVED. Moths don’t fly, they are AIRBORNE SHUDDERS. You can’t predict which way a moth is going to move next, and that’s terrifying.
3. Moths are SOFT. LIKE VELVET, OR AN OLD-TIMEY GENTLEMAN’S HAND. BUGS SHOULD NEVER BE SOFT, BUT THESE ONES ARE, LIKE THE FUR YOU GET ON YOUR TONGUE WHEN YOU’VE BEEN REALLY SICK, OR THE SOFT BLUE MOLD THAT BLOOMS ALL SICKLY-LIKE ACROSS TOO-WARM BREAD. YOU KNOW WHAT FEELS THE SAME AS TOUCHING A MOTH? TOUCHING A BABY RAT. BUGS HAVE GOT NO BUSINESS FEELING LIKE MAMMALS, SKIN-WISE.
4. Sometimes moths have FEATHERS. THAT’S WHAT BIRDS HAVE.
Okay, so those are some good reasons to hate moths. But a butterfly isn’t a moth, right? WRONG. Look at a butterfly close up. Forget the wing trappings. LOOK AT THE BUG THEREIN. IT’S A MOTH WEARING SOMEONE’S FANCY COAT AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT. Same twitched-up spindly legs, same nightmare body, same bristling appendages. Same flight pattern. All butterflies fly like they’ve just been poisoned. I don’t care how shimmery their sails are, they ruin the air by darting around like a pair of hands clapping silently.
Also, some butterflies migrate in really far directions? What right do bugs have to travel so much? That’s for birds. You stay where you are. You’re bugs.
“Oh, a chrysalis is great and so pretty.” You know what’s inside of a chrysalis, my dudes? A shivering, twitching convulsion of a smashed-up bug whose insides are throwing themselves up into a brand-new body. It is not, and never has been, okay that halfway through their lives moths and butterflies get to stop and immure themselves in a sac of, I don’t know, some sort of gel or pus they probably extrude from their horrible appendages before flattening themselves into a sickly body-bag and trembling into something new. Imagine a PERSON doing that.
“Where’s Mike?”
“Oh, he buried himself in the dirt behind his house. Even as we speak, his eyelids are pressed against the black earth, and his limbs contort in all manner of unspeakable positions, as his thorax cracks open and his bones take on a new and unseelie shape.”
YOU WOULD NOT ASK MIKE TO LAND DELICATELY ON YOUR FINGER AND SIP NECTAR FROM A PAPER CUP YOU BOUGHT FOR 25 CENTS, PROBABLY, IS ALL I’M SAYING.
Also here is a picture of some butterflies drinking blood through a sock I found on Wikipedia.
In conclusion, a butterfly is just a dressed-up moth and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you see one, kill it.
Tags: animals, arguments about bugs, butterflies, just straight up messed up stuff, moths, no, things that are the worst
Also here is a picture of some butterflies drinking blood through a sock I found on Wikipedia.
Happy spring, guys!
They’ll also go nuts over heaps of horse poop
oh my fucking actual god, can’t unsee can’t unsee
“A butterfly drinks a turtle’s tears, but how do you know he really needs it? As a butterfly feeds on a dead monkey’s hand, Jesus wept, he felt abandoned.”
this only makes me love butterflies even more. beautiful, bloodsucking nightmares.
Butterflies are a beautiful lie because we think that we can be like that, and the fact that they’re a lie makes them no less beautiful.
You’re right about moths, though, because Silence of the Lambs.
Thank you, I’ve always though moths are horrific, scary bugs, and as a result can’t look at a butterfly too closely. When I was on a camping trip through southern Africa, we were bombarded one night by GIANT MOTHS in Botswana while sitting around the campfire trying to eat our dinners. I seriously almost had a panic attack, and finally had to just escape to my tent even though it was a lovely evening and there were beers to be had.
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They looked like this, but each was almost the size of my entire hand (with fingers). Shudder.
But they only look like that so as to not get eaten by predators? They aren’t the bad guy moths. Gypsy moths, though, those are THE DEVIL ON EARTH.
Giant Moths of Botswana sounds like the title of an adventure tale in a pulp magazine, so thank you for that.
no YOU have death’s head moths tattooed on the back of your legs
what
whoa there buffalo bill
true story I have never seen/read Silence of the Lambs I just really like moths :'(
moth caught spying for its master, the Devil, and bribed (your bribe will not succeed)
HATERS TO THE LEFT
One of these (or something very similar) was hanging motionlessly on the wall by the designated smoking area at work for a week or so. Even though I know that it’s got too many legs and no mouth and it ONLY CAME HERE TO DIE it was just so fuzzy and pretty, I was distraught when it finally kicked the bucket.
I love you.
I really, truly love you for this.
Moths are not cute anime beasts, moths are dumb jerks who give birth rice-looking maggots in your rice, so you’re like why does this rice appear to be squirming OH DEAR GOD.
So you got extra protein in your diet through absolutely no effort of your own is what you’re saying.
Fun fact, some vegans (myself included) consider animal flesh that the animal has specifically gone out of its way to insert into your food as totally fair game. I would eat the squirming rice. Boil it and douse it in sriracha? Done.
In what other circumstances do animals go out of their way to put their flesh into your food? Like if a small bird divebombs your picnic and gets stuck inside your sandwich?
You are not selling veganism, not not at all.
I ate a bunch last year. Taking care of someone else’s home, trying to find a snack in their pantry, grabbed some sort of chocolate buckwheat granola…It was a few minutes before I saw the months. No, no, the larvae. You can’t taste ’em! And you can never forget them. Shudder.
“Tell me, Michael…..how can a billion Chinese people be wrong?”
+11111111111111
This comment just made my whole day!
And yours has mine.
Oh man my wife and I used to feed moths to this giant spider that lived outside our door. All the moths would gather by our porch light, and every now and then we’d just swat one into his web and watch him scuttle over and devour it. “There you go, Clyde! Enjoy!” we would say (his name was Clyde) and chuckle. AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A MOTH GENOCIDER SO THANKS FOR THAT
I used to do the same thing with ants that crawled into my room for the tiny spiders that lived in the corners of my wall.
For several months there was a small black spider in the corner of our dining-room window in my childhood house. It was summer and we were all voracious banana-eaters, so its random-looking corner-web was always densely filled with fruit-fly corpses. We kids appreciated its flycatching efforts and when asked to clean the dining-room window would carefully avoid its corner. We called it “Old Tom.”
When Mummy found out that Old Tom was a spider who was being permitted to live in the window, Old Tom was doomed. And there were slightly more fruit flies.
Oh s*it. The world has become increasingly scarier since I started reading Mallory’s posts.
A moth is a flying nightmare
Mallory, you must never ever under any circumstances read Perdido Street Station.
it gives you a pretty good idea what to expect when there’s a moth orbiting your bedroom light
I’m not sure anyone ever truly needs to read Perdido Street Station
Not sure which was worse, the slake moths or the mosquito women in The Scar. China Mieville and his bug people, I swear.
I was thinking of the slake moths as I was reading this, but christ I forgot about the mosquito women. Yeah, I think they were scarier.
I forgot about the mosquito women too. The slake moths triggered my horror/sadness about more or less the same thing happening to Tara on Buffy, though, so they really stuck with me.
gotta say after those two I was straight let down by the inchmen in Iron Council
he spends so much time trying to build them up as really scary, too
First thing I thought of.
I made it as far as the spider dress before I had to take a break.
I actually retched.
Spider dress.
NO.
That’s so badass though. Like an evil fairy queen would wear.
One time, I moved into an apartment, and the previous tenants left pantry items, and we had a pantry moth invasion.
Another time, I moved into an apartment, built my brand-new ikea bed with under-bed drawers, and then a couple days later opened a drawer and found that a big old moth had just up and died in the drawer. It specifically entered the drawer to die. Like an asshole.
In February, I went to my room to go to sleep and found a caterpillar just chilling on my wall. Where does a caterpillar come from when there’s 8 feet of snow on the ground? Hell, that’s where.
Oh god, pantry moths. I bought some sugar a few years ago that turned out to have been infested, and I’ve spent the past several summers trying to kill the damn pantry moths. Everything grain-based or that might possibly be grain-based lives in my refrigerator, because of the damn moths.
And when you try to kill them and miss, they try to attack you. I get why they might be pissed that someone’s trying to kill them, but…they’re tiny MOTHS and that is not a good survival strategy they’ve got there.
Augh! Pantry moths! I’ve gotten those and they are horrifying! Basically we threw away anything in the kitchen that wasn’t brand new or bleachable, removed all possible moth foods, bleach-water-washed the shelves (including the undersides) and walls of the pantry to eliminate any possible eggs, froze all the brand new grain foods, and then bought hard-plastic or glass airtight containers for future food storage. Pantry moths: a scourge.
It did work, though. There is hope.
I haaaaaaaaate pantry moths. I lived in a hippie co-op for a year or so in college, and we bought a wide array of pantry staples in bulk — and the goddamned moths were our scourge. Opening up a bulk bin of flour to discover them flying around: HORRIBLE.
So. I’d heard of weevils, but I’d never heard of pantry moths. I found this. I now regret ever hearing of pantry moths.
“Nothing’s creepier than pouring out some cereal and it starts to move! When the eggs hatch, the larvae will spin webs in the infested food. You’ll see the clumps of webbing and the little whitish worms. They start out really tiny but can grow to 2/3” long with black or brown heads. You may also see tiny cast-off skins after the worms have moved away.”
NO WHY GOD WHY. I”D BURN DOWN MY HOUSE MYSELF.
I love that, ‘moved away’. Like the larvae have grown up and gotten their own apartment in the city, and their sad shrivelled skin is the only reminder their old moth parents have left of them.
So, the cabin in the woods I go to in the summer is by a lake and has a very mid century glass wall facing it. There’s a lamp in front of this glass wall. At night, the light of the lamp attractts a BLANKET OF MOTHS, so many moths, different sizes! Shapes! Colors! Some large and forcefully enough to make loud BONK BONK sounds as they fly into the glass.
It’s fascinating. Some of them are the size of your palm.
YOU LIVE IN A NIGHTMARE
They don’t have teetH or claws or anything! The big white delicate ones looked like aliens and I think where just flying gonads, no mouth Or anything, all they do is fly and screw.
By ‘fascinating’, do you mean ‘horrifying’?
We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on moths but please tell me more about this wolf spider wedding dress, that sounds like a great way to ensure a whole-train-car-to-oneself type personal space bubble.
I would wear the HELL out of that dress. It is perfect slaughtering-mine-enemies fashion.
Considering that if there’s a moth in a given room, it will always CHASE ME, fuck moths forever. At least butterflies have the decency to go in another direction.
Are you a lightbulb?
I wish I knew. 🙁 Maybe I have lovely moth-attracting pheromones?
When I was a kid some jerk tiger swallowtail butterfly dive-bombed me while i was playing outside. I’ve hated both moths and butterflies ever since.
NOOOOO FUCK THOSE THINGS I HATE THEM SO MUCH AHHHHH FUCK IT GET IT AWAY!!!! They used to cling to the window at my house and leave gross fucking slime trails oh god i wanna throw up looking at it
I don’t… think moths exude slime? I mean I don’t want to negate the validity of your trauma but are you sure it was the moths causing the slime? Or like maybe it was powder from their wings, mixed with water condensation or summat? How fast were these moths traveling when they hit the window?
File under: Better if it was a ray.
Tell me what this creature is that I may worship it!
The Luna Moth, Actias luna.
“Also here is a picture of some butterflies drinking blood through a sock I found on Wikipedia.”
Moth and Other Moth! Oh God, Moth and Other Moth! Blood! BLOOD!
mother of god
I have a story about moths: one day I noticed there where all these black specks all over my kitchen. The ceiling, the cabinets, the walls. Everywhere. I climbed up on a chair to see what they where and to my horror they were all little unborn moths. They where also in all the food. I had to climb all over my kitchen to eradicate them. We threw away all the food and bought air tight containers to keep stuff in. I thought that was the end of it but then a week later my roommate took a bag of bread outta the fridge and inside where a bunch of fluttering moths. We screamed and screamed, they survived being born inside the fridge. I did a second purging and cleaning of the kitchen and they have never returned. Don’t let this happen to you – seal up your food!
HOLY JESUS GOD FUCK
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Just gagged. Now running to kitchen to check.
Slowly puts down the snack I was eating
Backs away from desk
Sets computer on fire
A few years ago we got an infestation of these kinds of moths that kept dying down and then coming back for MONTHS. I still have a distinct memory of my mom puttering around the kitchen with a swiffer sweeper and using it to stamp out the moths on the ceiling and the high parts of the walls.
Butterflies also like to eat poop.
(I like them though, sorry Mallory.)
For the most morbid short film about a moth, click here: https://youtu.be/Gzv6WAlpENA
It was included as a DVD extra for Ice Age (?) which is super weird.
Last summer my office had a huge moth problem, with large-ish moths flying up at my face when I moved mail around on my desk and dead moths accumulating in the stairwell.
I hate moths. Their furry bodies, the papery wings, the FLYING AT MY FACE. Ick.
YES! Mallory! I have been saying this forever (you do it much better, obviously). People thing it’s funny, like, “don’t you want to go into the butterfly house at the zoo?” And I’m all, “NO! They are just fancy dressed up moths, you guys!”
they’ll land on me with their horrible horrible feet. oh god.
This is the entire plot of “Girl of the Limberlost”
Oh, right. That and the really alarming snippet about the mom bleaching her skin with milk once she decides to be a good, civilized mom?! I mean: Wut? So much of that book really made 10 year old me stop and shudder.
Let’s not forget the entire last portion of the book which is ‘what makes an ideal wife and mother’?
the lesson of the moth
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
– Don Marquis, Archy & Mehitabel
ILU
Archy & Mehitabel poems are so great.
i will now have to amend my opinion of poems to “i do not care for *most* poetry”.
Well, Archy is a cockroach and his feet don’t reach the shift key on the typewriter. So it’s less poetry and more good stories with no caps or punctuation. 🙂
“i don’t care for *most* cockroaches”
edit to add: “good stories with no caps or punctuation” explains a lot of the attraction i have for this <3
But he’s a vers libre poet who was reincarnated as a cockroach, so I do think he’s trying to write poetry.
I was reading down the comments, thinking gee I’d better post that moth poem by archy, and there it was! Yay archy!
I have loved this poem for such a long time–like, since I was a teenager on AOL and had elaborate be-Wingbatted email signatures–and I am so delighted to see it here.
this poem. It turns normal 6th graders into 6th graders whose favorite word is “immolate”
I wonder if I would like being a moth more – you get to be all goth and scary and fly on up in peoples’ faces and hair, or a butterfly – cuz they’re basically the Plastics of the insect world, and that must be fun, to just be a pretty fabulous asshole loved by everyone purely for your looks. In conclusion, am I the butterfly or is the butterfly me and does it really matter?
omg the insect high school movie we didn’t know we needed
Cicadas/grasshoppers: band geeks?
Firefly: shy kid with hidden talent?
Weird jewel-colored beetle: art kid?
Hey girl you need a ride home? I have my license.
and then I grossed myself out by realizing that makes a chrysalis insect middle school
this… seems accurate to my experience of middle school, so
I mean, I do kinda wish sometimes I could have just spent those years in a cocoon, yes
SPECIFICALLY seventh grade.
Man, that sucked.
I would watch the shit out of this
Also then there needs to be a weird crossover fanfic with Hatoful Boyfriend where the insect school and pigeon school football teams play each other or something, and it ends in tragedy because the pigeons just eat the insects.
“Okay, you’re new here, so I’m going to give you one piece of advice. Stay away from that grody stoner Josh, got it?”
“Hey….you must be the new kid. You like hacky sack?”
(I can definitely keep this up all day)
“Hey, come on into my office, I won’t bite your head off!…..That was a joke, you’re thinking of spiders. I just want to ‘rap’ with you, give you some guidance and counseling, you know?”
Mottephobics unite!
I have run from rooms that had a moth in them. I have to steel myself to even clear away obviously-dead moths (THEY ARE SNEAKY AND MIGHT BE FAKING AND WAITING TO FLY UP AT YOUR WHEN YOU GET CLOSE). Once I was riding in the passenger seat of a car when a moth appeared, and despite my panic I somehow actually managed to roll down the window and shoo it out within a few seconds (while yelling in terror), which is good because if I hadn’t managed to find the damn power-window button I might very well have straight-up opened the door of a moving vehicle while in city traffic and bolted.
I have pretty much no other phobias — spiders, snakes, bees? no problem. heights, flying, public speaking? bring it on — but moths give me the existential heebie-jeebs. I just want them to stay far away from me forever.
Actually, my worst moth story is from a trip to the cottage. We had a campfire going, but it was out in the open so I was able to handle the occasional moth fluttering around the periphery. But then some kind of Mothra-spawn came out of the pitch-black sky (in my memory, the thing is the size of both my hands; in reality, it was probably about half that, because no bugs get that big where I live) and just kamikazed into the flames. AND IT DID NOT DIE. IT JUST SET ITSELF ON FIRE AND THEN STARTED FLAPPING AROUND AT ABOUT FACE-LEVEL. WHILE ON FIRE.
I tolerated about .0000001 seconds of giant-flame-moth flapping in the vicinity of my head before booking it into the cottage as fast as my legs could take me. Nightmarish. The friends I was with were surprisingly understanding (one of them has a deathly fear of snakes that had… come into play during a stroll through the forest earlier when we encountered a garter snake, so I think the whole group was pretty sympatico w/r/t phobias).
Eff moths. Big ones, little ones, not-on-fire ones, on-fire ones. All of them.
Some moths don’t have mouths (er, mouth-parts) so, there’s that.
But butterflies have taste sensors in their feet, so I’m kinda feeling Mallory’s point.
Ewwwwwwww.
Bogong moths, you guys. Because of COURSE Australia has the craziest moths.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-05/bogong-moth…
Australia is not so much a country as it is a snack delivery device for terrifying creatures.
I was riding my bike on my farm once and THWACK, bogong moth right to the face. I crashed right off my bike and cursed that moth-erfucker for a straight half hour.
I’m glad someone finally said it.
I really admire your commitment to terrifying people in this thread. A+.
Very slow work day, gotta stay awake somehow!
That seems about right.
Last summer I found a cool moth and put a picture of it on Facebook, and promptly received an epic crash course in the the Pro- vs. Anti-Moth/Butterfly War. I think it’s the most divisive Bug War of all.
“A moth is always two seconds away from flying mindlessly into your hair, where it will get tangled for a hundred percent of forever, and it will always flap madly against your neck, and it will never get out.”
This legit happened to my sister when we were kids, except it was a bee (A BEE), and it eventually stung her. To this day she is terrified of/loathes moths and birds due to their audible wing-flapping AND if you sneak up from behind and touch her ears without her seeing you, she has a grand mal freak-out, which as her younger sister I would never in a million years exploit all the time.
Also once she called me from an elevator because she was in it, alone, with a moth, and wanted me to know that if someone found her dead body in there later it was because the moth terrorized her to death. All Moths: Potential Murderers??!?!
I had that happen with a wasp. It stung me all up and down my ear before my dad got it out of my hair. I still get nervous when wasps do that thing where they fly round and round and round your head. Why do they do that? They really shouldn’t do that.
I once woke up to a wasp walking on my face and couldn’t move or call for help in case that startled it enough to sting me. It walked on my mouth. I must have been about ten.
wait until a moth manages to lodge itself in your ear canal, and it keeps thrashing around which just drives it in deeper, and wow there’s really a lot of sensitive parts inside the ear, and your HMO don’t give a shit till 9 on Monday so you spend a good 12 hours occasionally thinking maybe it finally died until it starts buzzing around inside your skull again
OH MY GOD
jesus h christ on a bike, how are you still here to tell us this tale.
I knew someone that happened to! And it makes me want to vomit every time I think about it!
I always just thought of moths as sexy, night time butterflies
“Also here is a picture of some butterflies drinking blood through a sock I found on Wikipedia.”
So goth. :3
Dracula Bus
One time as a kid I was sitting at home watching TV when I looked down at my feet and saw a moth chilling on my big toenail. It was the same size as my toe! I screamed and flailed and it HUNG ON until I scraped it off with a nearby book, and then I killed it with the remote. THE END.
That’ll teach you to keep your shoes on.
I once had a moth dive bomb down into the back of my shirt. I thought I felt something, but didn’t know what it was. Then, when I got into the bagel store, I felt it moving around on my spine and I just freaked the hell out and started screaming. I propelled whatever it was off my body, onto the ground about six feet away. That’s when I realized it was a moth – oh and with a big three or four inch wide wing span. Also, people are jerks because here I was spazzing out and everyone pretended not to notice, rather than help me and so I had to recover *on my own* and I weakly said (I was traumatized and really just wanted to get back to normal): “Oh, it was nothing, just a GIANT MOTH!” Again – everyone pretended not to notice! It was one of those “Am I hallucinating?” kind of a deals, because I was the only person reacting to this horror. Conclusions: People, specifically New Jersey people, frequently suck and moths freak me the f out.
one time in Philadelphia i had a bad reaction to my birth control and started uncontrollably vomiting into a subway station trash can. no one looked twice. Philly/Jersey is a magical land of jackasses and I kind of love it.
I’ve always liked moths, but I also realize that my lasting memory association is from when I was… 6 or 7 maybe? one got into my room and I trapped it in a tupperware and proceeded to keep it in there and stare at it for hours, occasionally shaking the tub around so it’d have to fly around…
I did EVENTUALLY let it go free to the great outdoors, but I think any incipient moth fears were allayed by my callous display of human superiority over small fuzzy flying bugs.
Thank you Mallory no one but you understands my pure hatred/terror of moths
“It’s just a moth! Calm down!” people say, as a feathery demon that hell puked back up flies STRAIGHT AT MY FACE
Edit: Just remembered that as a child I was obsessed with capturing caterpillars and attempting to nurture them to butterfly-hood. I would put them in glass jars with leaves and sticks and watch them with the single-minded focus of a child who has not learned to befriend human beings and has a lot of time on her hands. This worked exactly 0% of the time, until one day it did. It worked. The caterpillars (big, fuzzy, orange and black, if you are an intelligent adult you see where this is going) actually spun cocoons! I was so excited to meet my butterflies!
The horror I experienced when they hatched into GIANT, BUZZING GYPSY MOTHS THAT BANGED AT THE SIDES OF THEIR JAR WITH THE FORCE OF PURE HATRED is not something I can describe in words. I screamed, ran outside, opened the jar and flung it away from me, and watched them fly the hell away from me in a cyclone of racial slurs and fury.
FUCK GYPSY MOTHS STRAIGHT TO HECK
Fuck their invasive species-ness, fuck their don’t-even-make-silk-like-they-were-supposed-to-ness, fuck their racist name-ness, fuck their deforestation, fuck the rashes the caterpillars give you, fuck the sticky bits of egg sac you can never get off of your outdoor furniture, and especially FUCK THE FUCKING WAY THEY ARE EVERyWHErE OUTSIDE At ONCE FOR goDDAMn MONTHS AS THOUGH THEY ARE THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE OF MOSES.
ok so I just made the enormous mistake of googling moth caterpillars to see if what I’d accidentally created was indeed a gypsy moth and it turns out it may actually have been a wooly bear or tiger moth caterpillar, I’m not sure, what’s important is that I accidentally looked at hundreds of moth caterpillars and am genuinely nauseated right now.
This makes me believe I was better off that the one pet caterpillar I had as a child got accidentally squished in my sticker book.
My people! I had to cross the street in broad daylight* once, as apparently Argentina has giant moths that just hang out on walls IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY.
Bad enough being terrorised at nighttime. Way to break civilised rules , moth fiends.
*ran like a baby
Babies are notoriously bad at running.
I didn’t say it was elegant. Babies that get enough parental love, breathe in plenty of quinoa infused air, wear only organic cotton bathed in the tears of alpine monkeys – like my babies – can actually run very well. It’s a question of parenting choices
http://grooveshark.com/s/Summertime/wdD7a?src=5
The livin’ is easy…and everything possible is hanging out on the screen door under the back porch light, slightly twitching. Did you want to come inside?
Thank you. Just last night I checked my phone and THERE WAS A MOTH JUST CHILLING ON TOP OF THE SCREEN. MERE INCHES FROM WHERE MY TRUSTING, SLEEPING FACE HAD BEEN.
it had probably been eating the dead skin on your face
Just called to say he loves you.
Amen! I have a very high basal body temperature and those little heathens just lock on to that heat signature like tiny fighter jets made of flapping and nope.
Fuck moths, they are always trying to fly into people’s MOUTHS! But my horror of moths kicked up a notch one night as a teenager, as I lay in bed. I was trying to fall asleep, but felt something rustling in my shorts. Well, you know how this ends—with a moth crawling out of my shorts and then launching itself straight at my face.
Some butterflies drink the tears of humans and other adorable soft fuzzy mammals. The mammal is sad and the butterfly comes and wipes away the tears, and it is beautiful.
What the dude butterflies are collecting sodium so that they can surround their sperm with a tempting sodium-rich gift for the lady butterflies and thus have lots of babies? That… that’s… that’s still kind of beautiful. Sure. Nature, right?
What sometimes they will scratch the membranes around the fuzzy mammal eye to MAKE them cry and by sometimes I mean nearly always and also sometimes the scratching produces blood and that also has sodium so no problem? FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU SALTPIRE BUTTERFLY.
So butterflies feed on the tears and lamentations of other animals, is what you’re saying.
And then they make them into a sex posset.
I’m not even kidding when I say that that’s almost certainly an act attributed to witches, probably by Burchard of Worms or one of his confreres.
I don’t see how I could ever trust a creature with such an obvious incentive to cause sadness in others.
#peoplewithoutcatsproblems
I hardly ever see moths, because my cats round them up and stamp them to death. They won’t even eat them. Moths are too gross for my cats to eat and they groom their own nethers with their own tongues.
Mallory, you are amazing.
Where is Mike?
Please write something on Mosquito Eaters. I know they are our friends but the erratic flying and scary-ass, torturous-looking stinger bodies are terrifying. I need something to rid myself of the guilt after chasing them around my house like an intruder and bludgeoning them to death with pretty shoes.
I’ve never heard the term “mosquito eaters”, but on Googling it they appear to be crane flies and so therefore I second this motion. They are no friend of mine.
a clacking nest of cockroaches straight up flying at your nose, typing out your name in Morse code with the clacking of their hard-ass wings
Jesus Christ, Mallory
one time i woke up from a deep sleep in the middle of the early hours because there was A MOTH trapped between the curtain and window, making its terrifying fwip fwip fwish thwip thud fwip fwip noise at it desperately beat itself against the glass, getting its creepy moth dust everywhere.
i got out of bed and battled with the moth as i do with all flying intruders (with an outstretched swiffer, yelping, “mother of god” every time it divebombs toward me) and my adrenaline was so high, i couldn’t go to sleep even after i had destroyed him.
In the cheesetastic horror B-movie Phantoms (1998), Liev Schreiber gets killed by a moth. So, not a great movie if you hate moths, or if you’re really into Liev Schreiber.
I was watching this movie with a college crowd, and right after this happened, one of them remarked, “Chicks don’t respect a guy who gets killed by a moth.”
Chrysalises actually spare us from viewing the hideous transformation. I wish I had a chrysalis instead adolescence.
This plays right into my all-out war on pantry moths. DIE FUCKERS DIE
pantry moths recurred in my family’s kitchen for OVER A DECADE. We’d beat them back and kill them and they would always come back. With their damn tiny maggot young and the horrible crumbly crumbs they make out of grain based food. It turned me completely off cereal. Even today, in my moth free apartment kitchen, I keep my boyfriend’s cheerio’s in the fridge. Note,I say his cheerios, because I cannot eat them.
I am a refugee from the terror of MOTHS
I have maintained for years my dislike of butterflies, which if you tell people they will think it’s funny like you are joking or something. Butterflies are always flying around all ERRATIC like and UNPREDICTABLE and it’s CREEPY and frankly I don’t care for how I can’t properly keep tabs on them. Where are you going? What’s that sound? Did I brush against a fern or is that another freaking butterfly? Is that my hair or something in my hair? Where did that other one go? Quit moving around like you’ve got SOMETHING TO HIDE, BUTTERFLIES!
My dislike doesn’t truly extend to moths because no one is ever trying to get me to go to a “moth exhibit” or a “moth house” like that’s a totally reasonable thing to do or a fun activity or some shit like I want to duck into some plastic, moist, crowded horror show of a green house. Like “Oh, BUGS will LAND on you” is a selling point or something. Excuse me I got better shit to do like anything where unless I’m UNLUCKY there won’t be a ton of insects GETTING ALL UP IN MY FACE LIKE THEY ARE TRYING TO START SOMETHING.
When I started reading this thread, I did not have a moth phobia, but now it’s all different. Also, I feel like things are crawling on me even though I have been sitting in the same position at my desk for the last 20 minutes.
I was working out West for the summer, in the mountains. The staff slept in walled tents. Like you could stand up in them. It was actually pretty great listening to the rain fall on the canvas and hearing the howl of coyotes in the distance under the milky way. America, and all that.
Well, until the night my nearest neighbor started whimpering and crying in her sleep. She was whining and crying and whimpering up a storm. I worked with a lot of teen-somethings for whom this was their first time away from home. I was totally exasperated with this girl. Some cowboy broke her heart or something.
Nope. A moth flew in her ear. A moth. In her SLEEP. And it BURROWED. It burrowed and SQUIRMED and made terrible noises and caused her horrible PAIN. She was crying because it was the worse pain she’d ever felt in her teen life and she didn’t know what to do.
I found this out the next day. Some other girls finally left their tents and checked on her and then took her to the infirmary. Where the docs extracted the moth with some long moth-extracting pincers, and gave her painkillers and let her sleep. I felt like the hugest jerkface when I heard.
But also A MOTH IN HER EAR TRIED TO KILL HER!
I slept with a hat pulled down over my ears the rest of the time I was there. I’d like to say this made less of a judgmental jerk. I wish I could claim that. Poor kid.
Here where I live in Bath moths are not the problem, daddy long legs however… Summer comes and so do they, horrible buzzing balls of legs everywhere, flailing around every light, 50 to every room.
My girlfriend invented a ‘fun’ game too, catch one in your hand and throw it at me, thanks babe.
So, the thing about Humming Bird Moths is that they are the size of a humming bird. They are crepuscular though (a thoroughly awful word) so all you see is their giant segmented eyes.
That said… Meh moths are kinda cute.
Mallory, you probably shouldn’t ever read Perdido Street Station. No reason, just avoid it.
NIGHTMARE FUEL
I lost it at the mating scene because the particularly purple prose heightened the… event…
I came here to make sure someone had told her about the head sized moths in Africa. Thankyou.
AND they drink crocodile tears. TRUE STORY.
One summer, I was living in my parents home in the wilds of West Texas, when a migration of miller moths came through. Whenever we opened the screen door, it was like watching thousands of bats leaving a cave at dusk, but in miniature.
One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went into the kitchen to get a drink. I turned on the lights. And the walls of the kitchen were covered in miller moths. Covered. I counted fifty and stopped.
Meanwhile, my cats were wild. They were indoor cats, had never been able to hunt before in their entire lives, and they were relishing it. Stalking, crouching, and jumping on their prey. I never saw their inner tigers so clearly, before or after.
Also, a few days later, Reece killed a scorpion beside my foot. In that sense, I feel a bit of gratitude to the moths. Their deaths had trained him so he was able to take on ever more fearsome prey.
this poem. It turns normal 6th graders into 6th graders whose favorite word is "immolate"
Look, I hate moths too. But crane flies are worse. They have all the moth’s obnoxious qualities plus crazy legs that flail madly at you.
My 12-year-old son is afraid of butterflies, and now I know why. Like the dumb beasts, he senses evil deep in his unnamed soul: like a dog, barking at an empty corner, where there is clearly a ghost and we should all take a clue and run after torching the place.