legendary battle of wits: me vs. a common housefly

before you go and think i’m calling myself stupid, consider the fact that houseflies are evolving and adapting like those asshole girl scouts accepting venmo to eliminate the classic “no cash, sorry” escape. this fuckin’ fly this morning is perusing my bathroom while i’m trying to take my morning shit, bumping into things blindly yet undeterred like a person recording a concert on their phone from the middle of a mosh pit. i’ve had about enough after the fourth near miss with my face, so i grab the hand towel and start swinging (after i cleaned myself up, of course. in case that wasn’t assumed).

i hit the fly with a solid snap and it falls to the floor, belly up. dead af.
OR WAS IT? because i left the bathroom, satisfied with my opposable thumbs and logical brain only to return a minute later to find the fly was, in fact, still flying about uninhibited and happy. THIS motherfucker bro, this smart-ass fly was playing dead on me like a goddamn possum or my ex-gf back when i tried to follow her on insta post-breakup. i can’t believe this shit, flies have rational thinking brains now? was this part of its tiny plan when i first started swinging?

i mean, now i didn’t WANNA kill this fly out of respect for the hustle, but i HAD to kill it for my own pride. can you imagine starting your wednesday at 6:45am by being outsmarted by a housefly? that mf-er gonna make me look like an asshole when it can’t even discern the difference between a glass pane and open space? to be fair, i have walked into glass doors before but they were freshly cleaned and this window the fly was hitting hasn’t been cleaned since the cold war.

and hell, even if this fly deserved a second chance, it’s too powerful to be left alive to pass along its smart jeans to its 4,000 offspring. my logical human brain knows about natural selection, and this terminator-level fly would be the one to elevate the housefly to near-rat levels of survivability. we’re already dealing with rats, mosquitoes, and anti-vaxxers who boast astonishing levels of survivability. we don’t need to add houseflies to that list. so wednesday morning bathroom housefly: i posthumously award you this blog’s first ever Cunning Warrior Award. well met.