I'm not sure how common this unholy plague is in the rest of the country, but around this time of year, these clouds of tiny flies spring up everywhere around my neighborhood. They don't actually do anything, which I guess is part of why I hate them so much; they just pick a three-foot sphere of air in which to whirl around endlessly and bounce off one another.

Unless they're in a shaft of sunlight, these eye-level spheres of slacker flies are almost impossible to detect, so you'll just be walking along and suddenly dozens of them are ricocheting off your face. Once you've passed through, sputtering and cursing stupid nature, they go right back to their goalless antics. Then, since you're busy visualizing running around town with a flame thrower and a shirt with a crossed-out fly on the front, you walk right into fifty more flies.

At night, if you have a light near your window, they hurl themselves mindlessly against the glass, awed by your light source; through some impossible physics loophole, a few of them invariably make it inside, where they forget about your light and become enamored with your computer screen. Kill them, don't kill them; it doesn't matter. They are legion. There are always more.

I don't know if they're in any way related to mayflies, though I doubt it. We also get mayflies around this time of year; at night these horrible dragonfly-sized monstrosities find fluorescent lights in parking lots and congregate en masse, buzzing around and being douchebags, sometimes deciding to latch onto any car parked too close to a light, where you'll be unable to dislodge them unless you kill them. Soon their short, purposeless lives end and they blanket the earth with their dead.

One of my earliest memories is of driving back to Pittsburgh from Lake Erie one hot June evening and stopping at a Baskin Robbins for delicious ice cream. But before I could have delicious ice cream, I had to bypass the vilest of horrors; the plate glass windows and door were entirely obscured by a black mass of these awful mayflies. If you think I'm exaggerating, I am not. I was no more than 4 or 5, and this was my nightmare made flesh, but facing it would mean 31 flavors of wonderful ice cream. So I charged whimpering through the parking lot and into the store, gingerly opening the door a crack so none of this repulsive swarm would follow me. I remember shielding my Mint Chocolate Chip under my shirt as I sprinted back to the car, lest one of these mindless insects decided to fly idiotically toward me and lodge itself in my ice cream.

As it happened, none of the horrible things left their perches on the glass, and I occasionally wonder how that poor Erie girl felt, slouched behind the counter of a deserted ice cream store, her only company this teeming swarm of mayflies.

The point of this story is that lots of people complain without conviction about whatever season it is at the moment:

"Eww, it's fall! there are some leaves on my lawn sometimes!"
"Eww, it's spring! I sneeze a lot, and animals are probably all fucking in the woods!"
"Eww, it's winter! It is cold!"

All of that is bullshit to me. Summer is most people's favorite season, and to me it's intolerable, because I never have air conditioning and also because it breeds unnameable fucking horrors that find me and cluster around me wherever I am. Between the heat, bugs, and college bars closing for three months, summer is the genesis of everything I hate.

Only 7% of people have any sense.