It's getting so that I'm reluctant to turn on the lights at night.  The other night I went to brush my teeth and found close to a dozen moths fluttering around the bathroom.  No exaggeration.  And they're—

*Ian screams; ducks*

—quite enamored of the lamp in my writing office.

I'm not the only SF writer in New Mexico to notice it.  Vic Milan has posted about it, and so has my pinball sensei, Scott Phillips.  Seriously, the moths are everywhere.  And I try to be good about not killing them just for my own comfort.  Really I do.  I figure they're an important part of the ecosystem.  Or something.

But then one will brush my forehead after I've turned off the light to go to sleep, and then I remember their secret agenda to lay eggs in my eyeballs.  And then I start a-squashing*.

Which leads to dust.  Lots and lots of moth dust. 

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with the charming and erudite Serge Broom at a Bubonicon a few years passed.  We speculated about how much moth dust might have been produced if Godzilla had simply crushed Mothra.  It's hard not to wonder how many people would have been poisoned by the resulting dust plume.  Mothra is huge.

*I would not be squashing these things if they were luna moths.  They're large, but they're not that large.  I have seen luna moths around here, and they're really really cool.  Until I remember they're actually insects large enough for me to see their tongues from a distance.  Because eeeew.

[A quiet reminder: Bitter Seeds is now available in mass market paperback.]