Homeless in Vancouver: What really bugs me about flies

The Portuguese apparently have a saying about flies, that every one has its shadow. I believe this could be called a truism as it’s undeniably true but not very helpful.

A better and more useful thing to know is that “into an open mouth, a fly enters”—wryly pessimistic Sumerians in the ancient Near East were telling this to each other over 3,500 years ago, according to an endlessly quoted book by the great Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer.

Much before the Renaissance, I would look everywhere but the West for any useful knowledge about flies. For instance, the little pests often feed and breed in super unsanitary conditions—yet it never seems to kill them. Arabs at least took note of this fact some 1,400 years ago. And many aboriginal cultures have used fly maggots to clean dead tissue out of wounds since (by their reckoning) time immemorial.

Flies do possess powerful antibacterial defenses, as science is now discovering and Western medicine now routinely uses fly larvae to clean out wounds, but it wasn’t until the 1500s that European doctors even began to recognize the fact that some wounds healed better if you threw in some flies.

There’s a difference between tack and tact

Flies annoy me but only because they can walk on walls and ceilings as if gravity means nothing to them. Not only can flies do this but they flaunt the fact that they can do it by doing it constantly.

So I’d have to say that what I really dislike about flies is their complete and utter tactlessness.