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Some of these deep, deep questions that I consider in Coffee Stains deserve more than one article. Horseflys for instance. I’ve touched on this subject before but it’s too intricate to solve all the horsefly questions in one article.

So, this second one should finish the job.
You know, you’ve never really lived until you’ve been gnawed on by a horsefly. I didn’t know if they had teeth or not, but according to the deep, scientific tome, Wikipedia, they have “mandibles”. According to this venerated guidebook, horseflies usually feed on nectar or pollen. But, the females require a blood meal to be able to reproduce effectively. (A little vampire music in the background if you please).

So, there you have it. If you miss your swat you’re going to let her produce other little bloodsuckers. Aim quickly and carefully my friend.

Do you have a strategy for killing horseflies? I’ve been buzzed while on walks, while swimming and I suppose I’ve been attacked simply because some blood-starved female bug decided she needed a victim. I’m tried the “wildly-swatting-baseball-cap strategy.”

You’ll only get her if you’re lucky.

I’ve tried the “let-her-land-and ‘boom’!” strategy but she usually aims for the back of my neck or shoulders. I often end up conking myself on the head.

You could probably take a can of bug spray along on your walk and if you got lucky you could fill her blood-sucking mandibles full of Raid (bugspray). That’s a one in a thousand shot, though.

The best strategy that I’ve found is just to wave a lot, swat a lot and yell a lot (no cuss words please). Yelling doesn’t do anything except make me feel better, though.

Over the course of my life, real-life horseflies haven’t really extracted much skin from my hide, but there are other ones—invisible these–which have. These “horseflies” buzz around at 4 a.m. in the morning and refuse to let me sleep. They have probably taken hours out of my life.

Worries. Obsessive ideas that I can’t let go of. Fixations.

One French lady told me, “I know I’m hard to live with but …”

And I thought, “If you know it, do something about it!” As life progresses, though, I’ve found it’s not always that easy. Often we would love to smash those horseflies to a little, gooey gob but we just can’t seem to land our blow and the exasperating thing is that they keep coming back.

We swat and swat and she seems to be gone, then suddenly we hear,

“bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz” and it’s back to the battle. At the end we’re tempted to stick out our arm and say, “Here, take what you want. I’m tired of fighting.”

So … how do you kill these “horseflies,” these obsessive worries, these fixations of fear, jealousy, pride, doubt, sin, anger about a situation, or whatever? How do you get loose?
That’s what I want you to tell me. I’m preparing a study and I’d like to know what you think. I’d love to have you story. I’ll share it with our other readers because many of them are asking the same question.

“How do you escape when you’re captured by a thought or action that won’t let go?” David.porter@agmd.org (or leave your comment in the comments area of this page.