The Bug Saga Pt. 1

In Which Our Narrator Begins His Narrations or Nostalgia Just Ain't What It Used To Be

For being positioned directly in front of a semi-conductor, the view from Fitzpatrick 203 is not bad. There is enough tree cover to hide the massive cylinder of galvanized steel and the protrusions of black cable carrying power to the rest of campus. Nature is used to conceal technology, as if the control of electricity were something to be ashamed of. But they have used nature as technology too. Technology to hide technology. As if nature and technology were radically opposed to one another at their very core.

Still, the view is not bad. Better, in fact, than the view I had of the carwash my roommates and I thought was a front for drugs or the shouts of drunken Allstonians as they staggered towards their dilapidated abodes. I am, in many ways, miles and years away from that place, from that vista. And the funny thing is, I don’t know which direction—further back or further ahead—those miles and years have taken me. There is a circularity to life which is attested to in Nietzsche’s writings (although he is not the only one to speak of such things) that I have come to experience on more than a few occasions. Right now, in this present moment, the moment stretched just long enough to be perceivable before being consumed by the growling stomach of memory, I am once again in a new place that is far too familiar to keep me settled. In the present moment, I sit in my dorm room—the aforementioned Fitzpatrick 203—located on the upper campus of Boston College. I sit here and I stare out my window through the trees at the semi-conductor. I sit here at the top of this “city on a hill” as pretentious and crazy as that notion is.

Five years after I left the dorms for good I have returned. In the interim I have lived in one shed-like cabin, three houses, two apartments, and countless friends couches. I have toured, recorded, made all manner of latte, bound books, written papers, completed around 20 grad school applications, presented at a conference, studied and stressed more than I ever thought was possible, and gotten (well almost) a master’s degree. All of this happened outside of living in a dorm room. And yet, absurdly, here I am in Fitzpatrick 203. There is a crazy journey that led to feeling like such an adult with all the responsibilities and certainly all the bills to being a dorm resident. I, of course, still have the bills but lack all the perks.

From this dorm room perched high atop the city on a hill that is a light to the nations I must tell my tale. My main task right now is to open the story. It is to introduce you to the characters and somehow make you care about them as if they were real people (which they are—most of them). I have to lay down the setting for you with all the appropriate metaphorical flourishes that allow for you to see what is coming up ahead thematically. "Oh I get it, the transformation of the trees into technology is a metaphor for the effects of industrialization on the purity of the earth" you might say. And you wouldn't be wrong. You just wouldn't be thinking what I'm thinking when I tell this story. For the record, the setting is not the dorm room. This is where it kind of ends. Where it begins, well, that origin is found in the view of drunken Allstonians wandering the frigid streets in February.

This is not a story that has heroes or wise old sages of the ‘mystical wisdom (insert non-anglo ethnicity here)’ variety. It is not a romance nor is it merely a tragedy or merely a comedy. Well, any romance that happens in this story certainly doesn’t involve me. Although the tragedy and the comedy, they most certainly include me. And I guess there might be a mystical wisdom pastor or professor or janitor scattered throughout but I wouldn’t count on it. But there are vampires. Lots of blood-sucking little vampires.

Some might say that the vampires are the most important part; that they are the whole story. I got bugs, they made a nice apartment unlivable, and then I moved. Finished product. This take on things would be to leave out all of the little eccentricities that make this a good story. The vampires are, in all honest, very flat characters. They do one thing and one thing only: suck blood. It is in the reactions, the quiet desperations, the breakdowns, the untimeliness of it all that this story has any worth in telling.

So that is my charge. To tell the bug saga. The rise of an empire of vampire bugs who devastated the lives of four men who chose to live together and the chaos that ensued.