At the risk of sounding like a bad stand-up comic, which is still one rung higher than a bad sit-down writer, what’s the deal with fruit flies? I now host an entire army of them. I gather that they “go to where the rotting food is,” as someone told me on the phone. Brilliant!

That’s fine. I’ll take the trash out. My question is, where do they come from? Do they just hang out under the floorboards or between bricks in little colonies, waiting for me to throw out the bags of salad mix I buy and refuse to eat? Is it possible that they spontaneously materialize WITHIN the trash can once the produce has been deposited there?

I know the latter option is a stretch. But think about it: isn’t it a little more settling to imagine bugs forming themselves within a receptacle in which you can sustain their lives than to have to cope with the idea that they are everywhere, all the time, possibly staring at you while you eat caramel brownies and then furiously do your situps?

As usual, I didn’t bother to look something up before blabbering about it. Check out this explanation garnered from the creative Google search - get this - “where do fruit flies come from”.

Okay. I’m sorry, but isn’t the imagery in that paragraph like, alarmingly harsh? I seriously think the writer was trying to freak people out. It’s almost like he’s on the fruit flies’ side, calling their range of nutrients “impressive,” having them “flourish” instead of just existing, and noting the miraculous “special” capability to thrive in the face of poison. Way to go, fruit flies!

I can only conclude that the paragraph was written by a fruit fly. No human is that sympathetic to the cause of insects. And I can understand how, since people are really annoyed by fruit flies, they’d want to sort of prove their worth with powerful adjectives and a heroic tone. They’re all, “Take that, humans! We can infest the Internet, too!”