Notes from Maine - 2026/09/13
After two nights, I couldn’t stand it any longer. The cricket is dead. Somehow, one of those big, incredibly-loud crickets made its way into my house. A couple of nights ago, around 4am, I got up and closed the window. The sound wasn’t diminished at all, but I was too tired to go on a hunt. Last night, just after midnight, I was even more tired but I had just gotten into bed.
My friend (Jim) was playing guitar in a bar just across the bridge. He’s one of my pinball friends, and I knew a bunch of other pinball friends would be in attendance. I picked up Erin on the way—she had friends there as well. Erin has friends everywhere. It was nice watching Jim play his acoustic and tell stories. His songs are always stories. The other acts were less interesting. If you’re twenty-two years old and you’re playing a song from 1992 about a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam, your delivery is likely going to feel disingenuous.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a singer to capture emotion outside of their experience. Jerry Cantrell wrote that song (Rooster) from his father’s perspective. His father was in Vietnam, seeing his son (Jerry) for the first time in a photo from his wife as he desperately tried to stay alive.
But after Jim played a song that he wrote for his mom—the circumstances that led her to hit his dad in the head with a frying pan—it was weird seeing a young man yodel his way cheerfully through a song about war and loss.
All that said, it was a fun, tiring night.
I came home, did my chores, got into bed and heard the cricket again. I couldn’t stand the idea of listening to it chirp in vain all night, so I got a flashlight and went on a hunt. Albert (dog) thought it was a great idea, although he didn’t seem to grasp precisely what we were doing. I moved furniture and got down on the floor to point my flashlight in dark corners. This led Albert to believe that it was time to play.
By the time I found the cricket, I was in no mood for mercy. I used the vacuum cleaner to suck it up and then immediately went out to the garage to empty the canister. I didn’t think there was any way that the cricket might have survived the incarceration, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I’m not a “carry every spider out into the yard” person on my best day. In the middle of the night, I suppose I lean towards insect cruelty. I kept thinking about who the natural predator for the cricket would be. On the news last week they had a story about a cafe in Maine that cooks insect cookies or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. There always seems to be someone trying to push the idea of eating bugs, and somehow those ideas never catch on. I can’t imagine why. Maybe, just maybe, most people find bugs gross and don’t want to eat them?
There’s a toad living in the barn right now. It hangs out near the water spigot, where sloshes from bucket-filling have made a damp spot. That was my first idea when I heard the cricket: “I should go find that toad.” After considering the details of that notion—getting dressed, going outside, hunting through the barn for a toad that I’ve seen a few times, catching the toad, bringing into the house, and then hoping that it tracks down the cricket—I reconsidered. Once the toad started croaking (or whatever toads do), what would I let loose to hunt that down? It’s a silly question. Albert, of course, would hunt that toad down, probably even before the toad found the cricket. Then I would have spent all night at the vet with Albert, dealing with toad poisoning.
The whole experience made me remember something from my childhood. Somewhere, I saw a tiny bamboo cage meant to keep a cricket as a pet. The practice has been traced back more than 2,000 years. In China, people would hollow out gourds and keep the crickets in there. The gourd would amplify the chirping and they would keep the cage near their pillow so they could fall asleep to the cricket’s “song”. They must have better crickets over in China. This thing was LOUD on its own, and there was no way I could sleep through the racket it made. A bunch of crickets in the distance, through an open window, is lovely. Give me that all night. But one cricket in the house was an absolute menace. I was psychotic inside of an hour.
