I'D GIVE MY QUEENDOM

for a fly swatter, Gentle Readers.

Here I am in the middle of summer and every time someone opens a door, the flies come buzzing in, circling my head, landing on any food left uncovered for longer than a nanosecond, and making my dogs crazy as they chase and snap at the flies, which they never catch, because flies are wily bastards.

Why don't I have a fly swatter?

I can't freaking find one!

I have searched every store in my tiny hamlet to no avail. I even done went to the big city and checked out national chains like Lowe's and Home Depot. Everybody is out of fly swatters. Or at least they claim to be.

I strongly suspect that someone was killed in a freak fly swatting incident and that all fly swatters have been recalled but some fly swatter magnate has managed to cover it up, hoping he can get his instruments of torture back out on the shelves in time for . . . winter?

It seems to me that there used to be commercials for some kind of strip that you were supposed to hang from your ceiling and flies would get stuck to it. Wasn't the slogan that it would kill flies dead?

I never knew anybody who had one of those fly strip thingies, but wouldn't it be gross to gradually watch them fill up with the bodies of nasty little flies?

And when it was full, I guess you would leave it where it was as a warning to other flies that if they came in your house they, too, would be killed dead, because, otherwise, you would actually have to touch the damn thing to take it down and you'd need to wear a bio-hazard suit and multiple pairs of gloves and you'd need one of those nasty decontamination showers afterwards like they make Meryl Streep take in Silkwood when they strip her naked at work and scrub her really hard in the shower and she's screaming and crying.

Just another day at the office for me when that happens.

My flies are in two places: the kitchen, which makes sense, and the master bathroom. Getting to the kitchen is a straight pass from the back door, but how do they find the bathroom? And why do they go in the bathroom? Are the kitchen and the bathroom the two dirtiest places in the house?

I guess so. Food and shit, they go together like flies and . . . butter?

O.K. Now I want to know why something so pretty that is never annoying has fly in its name.

Love,

Lola