Rain Day (7/23)

It rained all day… pouring off and on. We didn’t get in the water. Everything is damp. The covers of my books are curling up and my bed feels disgusting.

I spent most of the day reading. Did you know that bed bugs mate by way of traumatic insemination? The male is armed with a long sharp penis. Instead of linking genitals with the female, he uses this organ to puncture her in the abdomen. He then ejaculates into her body cavity, and the sperm travels through her bloodstream to special receptacles, where she can store it until her time of ovulation. The puncture wound heals over, and all is fine. This sounds perversely like the worst sort of S&M, but to bed bugs, it’s just sex as usual. But hand on, it gets better. One particular species of bed bug practices homosexual stabbing-rape. The males puncture and inseminate other males. In fact a male may be thus assaulted even WHILE he’s copulating with a female. The punctured male serves as a proxy, in other words, a genetic courier, delivering the sperm of his attacker on to the next female with whom he mates.
It’s dark now and it finally stopped raining…. Just in time for the bugs to come out.