Illustration by Elizabeth Kairys

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"The june bug Jackson Pollocked my windshield." What a sentence! It flatters the reader, presupposing that he or she is familiar with the rudiments of both entomology and modern art. At the same time, it paints a picture in the mind that the reader may not want there. (Cool!) Mildly annoying, vaguely elitist, self-important, Raymond Chandler-ish in a pretentious kind of way, and cute as a bug's ear, it's one hell of a sentence. I wish I'd written it. But it's the lead sentence of a print ad I saw in Mother Jones. Unfortunately, the ad continued -- "And as I looked at its (the june bug's) innards, I saw substance. Which made me think. Is there still room in a society of disposable razors, disposable cars, and disposable marriages for anything with substance?" (Disposable cars? Last time I went to the airport, I didn't notice any Bic four-wheelers littering the short-term parking garage. Have I missed something? Has Hertz been replaced by vending machines?) By the end of the ad, I learned that there's room for substance in our disposable society after all -- National Public Radio! That's right. NPR's programming contents were compared (favorably!) with insect guts. This simile, as filtered through Hunter Thompson and Allen Bloom, may be an advertising first. I don't remember june bugs having much substance at all. As I recall them from youthful summers in Minnesota, june bugs were large, stupid beetles who, for unknown reasons, would fly into the screen door, fall on their backs, then flop around on the porch until someone flipped them over, and they'd fly away to repeat the process. Sometimes a june bug would fly into the dog's ear. Oh, how we'd laugh! But I don't recall ever cracking one open to see what substance it contained. We weren't that stoned. Next page: The Happi Hour of Gregor Samsa