30 Apr Everything is bigger in Texas

I’m visiting a friend in San Antonio, and we’re walking to our car and I feel some scratching and biting along my ribs. We lift up my shirt and don’t see anything and decide that it’s the extra buttons and tag scratching me somehow. But that just doesn’t make sense, because that stuff is down by my hip and I was feeling it up on my ribs.

I get in the car and as I’m putting on the seatbelt I feel scratching and biting on my chest. We pound on my chest with the palms of our hands trying to figure out what the hell is attacking me, and I end up looking down my shirt like a woman looking at her own boobs. Nothing. My friend says I’m just itchy now and have something in mind that’s making me think there’s something attacking me.

As I’m getting out of the car something is clawing and scratching at my shoulder blade. We pulled my shirt up around my neck and my friend is saying, “man it’s just your imaginat- holy CRAP!!!”, and he starts frantically pawing and swiping at my back. He grabs something and throws it on the ground, a giant cricket. So here we are, two grown-ass 50-year-old men in a Target parking lot, me half undressed, somehow simultaneously shrieking like 9-year-old girls and swearing like sailors. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

John is interjecting that the cricket wasn’t really THAT big, and that somehow his shrieking was the most masculine shrieking ever. Whatever.