Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Not listed on the menu....

One of the great things about being a New Orleanian is that at any given week (especially festival time) there is some kind of party going on or event which has a ton of free food and drink. If you fall on hard times (which I've done quite often), you can carefully plan an entire week of indulgence via house parties, swank soirees in hotel meeting rooms, and even sneaking in venues like the House of Blues for massive corporate feasts thrown by visiting conventioneers. If times get really hard, you can go down to the neighborhood bar, run a tab, eat some pretzels, and "accidentally" forget to pay your bill till you get some cash the following week. One day I may write a manual on this but I suppose my market for it wouldn't have the cash to buy it....it would have to be an Abbie Hoffman effort.

So last night I inadverently discovered a whole new way to fill your gut for free.

For those of you unfamiliar with New Orleans...we have a major termite dilema. Every May for about 3 weeks we are subject to massive Formosa Termite swarms which mystically rise from the mud just as the sun sets (much like a zombie) and then become mesmerized by any and all light sources. If you live in the Quarters you learn the hard way to close your windows and turn out all your lights during this period. The little boogers (and that's exactly what they look and feel like) swarm around until they find a good mixture of wood and water, then their wings fall off and they climb into the walls of our already structurally challenged buildings and commence to devouring whats left of the century old wood which props da Quarters up.

So back to the swarming part. I was tooling around on my scooter last evening, and headed for the CBD just as the sun had set. The moment I crossed under the interstate on Camp I noticed them.....damn....I was going about 40 and I knew this wasn't going to be pretty. I zoomed through the first swarm and was immediately covered in the little fuckers...luckily I was wearing googles so I didn't have to worrry about being blinded. My mouth on the other hand....well...I sucked a couple down. To my surprise, they actually tasted pretty good. I figured what the hell....I accelerated into the next swarm and opened my mouth like a massive baleen whale eating krill. I was already on my way to eat at a new Mexican restaurant in the Marigny, but the little guys made a pretty good appetizer...you just have to make sure you swallow and not inhale. Unfortunately, I don't have a blowhole so that proved challenging.

15 comments:

LAW70 said...

Dude, you are awesome!!

Anonymous said...

About 15 years ago I was part of a group that had a standard weekly pick-up basketball night at then-McDonough 39/now-Avery Alexander elementary school on St. Roch. Late spring would be the time of year to open all of the doors to try to cool the gym down. One evening we're running up and down the court when (seemingly all of a sudden) we notice that the place is swarming with some kind of fluttery, not-quite-aerodynamic bugs. We try to ignore them, but the cloud keeps getting thicker and thicker (we didn't know to close the doors and turn the lights off, of course--which would have ended the game, anyway, so we wouldn't have done it if we'd known). We're running down court with our mouths hanging open, gasping for air, and in the process are ingesting fairly large amounts of what we later learned were Formosan termites. We eventually shut down early when the little critters were starting to get so thick on the floor that we actually began to slip on them.

Anonymous said...

luckily I was wearing googles

You were wearing search engines on your head?! How very postmodern!

Termite boil at Zombie's next May! "Suck the head, squeeze the, (da da da da da da da) squeeze the tip!"

Sam Jasper said...

EWWWWWW~When we first moved here a few yrs ago, no one had warned me about this phenomena, so there I was tooling down the street on my bicycle about 8:30 at night and wham, I was in the middle of a horror movie. I had no freakin' clue what these things were but they were stuck to my skin, in my hair, all over my glasses. I got home and breathlessly told our landlord (we lived in a double) about the Wes Craven adventure. He started laughing, and laughing, and laughing as I stood there covered in a sort of brown goo. Then once he recovered he explained what it was. I've made very sure not to encounter that again if possible, and eating them? You are so much a braver person than I!

Maitri said...

Speaking of Mexican food, you can also eat your termites the way I eat my grasshoppers, in a tortilla with guacamole and salsa.

Anonymous said...

If'n you don't like termites, you just never had them prepared properly.

oyster said...

I suppose that's one way to get more protein, but I'm not doing that.

Anonymous said...

you're definitely on to something here D - not only are termites tasty (Audubon Zoo once had a whole traveling exhibit on termite recipes), but now they're being used to produce ethanol:
http://www.newstarget.com/021751.html

Erzulie said...

That is gross! I guess if it's hard times, you'd ay least get your protein.

Anonymous said...

Ewww.

Anonymous said...

Dude, you are a complete idiot. First you want to teach people how to take advantage of people (very old school New Orleans of you) and now you want to eat bugs? That is just sick, though the consumption of any flesh is sick. Maybe you can write a book on suicide.

Leigh C. said...

I'll have to pass that info on to my friend Justin the tree man. And all this time, he's been trying to kill the Formosans with a fungus...

Jason Brad Berry said...

So Anon...i guess my next post about the slow roasted Cocker Spaniel isn't gonna go over well with you either.

Jason Brad Berry said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jason Brad Berry said...

Kama,

so now that you pointed it out...I can't correct it or your comment wont' make sense. So yeah...i was wearing the Googles on my face. I'm a walking search engine.