Last night I woke up with more stomach cramps. It was those damn mussels I ate, too much parsely, that’s for sure. Go easy on the parsely said the Dharma teacher to the head. Love your stomach and intestinal tract. I try to, yes I surely do, but time is running out. What is going to happen?

That’s the question I didn’t want to ask last year or the year before. What is going to happen? It’s the question that James, ‘Clubber’ Lang, aka Mr. T knew the answer too when a journalist asked him to predict the outcome of the bout with Rocky Balboa: “Pain” was all he said.

Pain. Suffering. It’s becoming clearer that the Dharma gets it right. Every moment contains suffering. How? The suffering is in wanting the moment to be different than it is. And as last night after the fifth trip to the bathroom showed, there isn’t a moment when I don’t wish at least something were different. Different house, different shoes, different view out of a window.

‘Keep it real’ was the mantra years back until Chris Rock popped that bubble. It’s a neo-realist mantra and so one that for me remains helpful for writing. I could describe the houses I lived in in Texas growing up, one green and white or was it brown and white? Keeping it real, what is real forty years later is the heat that blasted the driveway full of holes, creases. The heat that baked you and the black into its very fabric. So hot you could fry an army of rolly-pollys, the famous sowbug, into it if you really wanted to.

Sometimes I really wanted to. We would be out in the middle of the driveway, in front of the ping pong table, sweating even more than we normally would. The idea would come. Let’s get the magnifying glass (the microscope came later as a torture device). We would round up all the rolly-pollys we could find and then box them into a corner of the driveway. No escape. Ten seconds of Texas sun lasered through a magnifying glass was all it took to get the smoke coming off them. We could hear the crackling of them being roasted alive. That is what I remember of our houses. No details about colors, who lived to the left or to the right; no idea what the color of the fence was. Instead the smell of burning insects alive on the driveway; the sound of their outer shell splitting and the two of us, or sometimes just me, bearing witness to our violence.

Bugs arrived every night to our house in Texas in droves. In the living room you could barely hear yourself talk with all the grasshoppers, fireflies, moths,and god knows what else hitting the porch screen door. An army of bugs. I would close the glass door around 9, pull the curtain so the little devils couldn’t see the light, which they of course they still could. I’d turn on the television to watch M*A*S*H, but between jokes, in the middle of jokes, the bugs would pop against the screen.

No rolly pollys though. They were the only insects who slept at night. That was the only conclusion a 13 year old could draw. We saw them during the day, one by one, which made them the most individual of bugs. The opposite of communitarian ants and thus the perfect bug for an individualistic Texas. We would find them in the cracks between the sidewalks. They would be there crawling along. I could see the little legs working furiously to get away from us and to safety. But there is no safety from a teenage boy with a magnifying glass. Or matches. Or gas siphoned off from the lawnmower. Or nails. We devised all sorts of ways to torture the rolly pollys.

We didn’t torture other insects. They were too fast or just not interesting enough. Plus they would disappear during the day given the heat. The rolly polly was the only one out there with you. The rolly polly was the king of the inert, the slow, the defenseless, the bug that was just begging to be set on fire, drowned, stomped on, picked up and flicked like a booger. I used to look at the bottom of my shoes at the end of the day just to count up the stains of rolly polly bodies that had been crushed under the weight of my foot. The bugs left a kind of oil on the bottom. Not blood but an essence. I tried to keep count but failed.

You can say all you want to about them being just bugs. That they didn’t have brains. Fine. But there’s no denying the violence of those golden days in Texas and that forty years later I can still hear and smell what that violence wrought.