Pests - Tumblr Posts
Polytheistic Ramblings: Ninkilim
So I’m sitting on my bed, sick as a dog, and filled with the sort of single-minded half-mad frenzy that only insects can inspire in me. Insects are fine. They can live their little insect lives. But if they don’t pay rent, they don’t live in my apartment, and I can only pour so much salt on my threshold and windowsills. The logical solution is to buy some bug spray and go to town on my foundation, but that won’t protect me from the aerial fury of mosquitoes and flies given time to glut and grow in the sweltering Arkansas heat. Further south they’re big enough to shoot, alright. Forget rent, those boys need a warrant before coming through my windows. And I refuse to think about some of the cockroaches I’ve seen in the area.
I admit to having a phobia, I admit to being that one little crybaby who locks up and shrieks for backup at the sight of some swollen little creature with too many legs and possibly even venom, but all of the green save-the-planet intentions in the world won’t stop my panic, so I roll with it. And I get creative.
I make incense in my spare time, or attempt to. The humidity here isn’t good for drying cones, and my nose is genetically wired wrong enough that I can’t hardly smell my work, but it’s fun and an endless hands-on puzzle for me to solve. And, on an even better note, it’s cheaper to make your own cedar incense than it is to buy the stuff by a long shot. The effort that goes into making incense makes the offering feel more personal, when it works anyway, and I like to think it’s a good way to honor Nuska, as the god of fire who carries prayers to the sky, or any of the other gods of purification. I purify all of my tools obsessively when I work, usually with water. But I titled this after Ninkilim in particular for a reason, and here it is:
If I can get one of these recipes to work, first order of business is dedicating the batch to them. I know of a lot of purification gods, but Ninkilim, as the lord of rats and locust teeth, has a long history of being petitioned by the everyman with pest control concerns. A very early farmers’ almanac instructs the farmer to make an offering of mersu and perform rites in the field for Ninkilim. I haven’t been able to track down the particulars of those rites, but I can only hope that my respectful fumbling is persuasive in some manner, because everything I am is repulsed by bugs and rodents, and making offerings now and again to the deity of little crawling creatures is hardly too much to ask in exchange for a little peace. There isn’t a lot of information out there a lowly wage slave like myself can access, but by all the gods if I’m going to do one honor then I’m going to do so with as much information under my belt as possible. So I have a tiny cache of PDFs, foremost among them being The Dogs of Ninkilim (parts 1 & 2). Secondary resources, maybe, but I haven’t been able to find any tablet translations with enough useful content, so a little faith in humanity is sometimes appropriate.
So I make offerings, trawl for information, and sometimes get to see the way my beloved and brilliant girlfriend glares at me while I test-burn incense blends for the noble purpose of protecting our home from the encroaching hordes of crawlies. In my defense, I had no idea that my experiment smelled like weed. Lemongrass apparently doesn’t smell like lemons when you burn it, who knew? That’s a good note for my mad scientist journal though. One of these days I’ll perfect it. I’ll make an insect-repellant incense worthy of dedication to a god, field test it, and then woe betide any unwelcome intruders. Entomophobia? Yeah, still present. But I have the mercy of Lord Ninkilim and a fistful of basil on my side. Have at thee, fiends.
Just wanted to remind you guys of my most favorite article ever. This one is newer bc I couldn't find the original one, but this is just as wild.. Behold... The Bobbit Worm Chronicles
tw: big worm
i was linked to this absolutely wild thread from 14 years ago on a forum for aquarium enthusiasts from michigan: a guy has a 90 lb rock in his aquarium that was infested with a bobbit worm (the penis thing is a misconception) that poses a threat to the rest of his fish and solicits help on how to kill it. but because he can't feed the worm poison without risking the decomposing body killing the other fish, he's doing looney tunes shit to it
warning for occasional pictures of scary worms that looks like jrpg bosses