Innawoods: The Bitter Sting

I swear this turns into a militia story

It's been an interesting journey, trying to handle all the things I struggle with in my life while keeping this thing updated on time. The outpouring of positivity, support, and empathy has been truly worth the sinking dread I feel whenever someone's paid subscription renews after I missed the weekly deadline. That is why I regret so much to tell you all that this week I was stung by a bee.

Mostly because it hurt, but also because I feel bad for the bee.

It was like that even before I fell into the clutches of vile leftist environmental foolishness. I have always liked the little guys, even before I even knew that bees were in serious danger and how badly we need them to survive. Blame an early learning environment heavy on bug documentaries back when Animal Planet wasn’t ghost adventures and reality TV. As I fell further down the pollinator advocacy rabbit hole, I started to feel a share of personal blame for the decaying ecosystem and mass insect dieoff whenever I found one dead on the front of my car. Worse, I have recently learned that bees are not actually meant to die when they sting but are killed by a stinger design meant for other hostile insects and so aren’t even expecting it when they die.

It’s the second saddest bee fact I know, after Bumblebees exposed to ‘bee safe’ pesticides developing little bee dementia and dying alone when they get lost and can’t find their way home.

You can then imagine then the overthinking spiral I fell into, looking down at the twitching dying honeybee who’d just fucked up my left arm for no good reason with a deep sense of betrayal followed by feeling bad about feeling betrayed. Bees can recognize individual humans once they get familiar, but there is no way this one had been able to hear through the bee gossip network that I pour out water for them and am, without exaggeration or hyperbole, willing to physically fight absolutely anyone at any time on their behalf. They’re not crows, another animal that I have failed to befriend in general despite my best efforts.

I am frequently reminded of this little tragedy, mostly because this happened last week and the sting has not stopped hurting. Even now I can look down at the painful rash and persistent swelling that multiple days in a benadryl fugue have not brought down, although it was a stumbling block in my efforts to post my writing on time, network for local politics, and stay awake while driving.

It didn’t have to be this way, but since my teen years every subsequent bee, wasp, and hornet sting has brought on a worse and worse allergic reaction and my path is probably on an inevitable downhill into the fun and private healthcare expense of For Real Allergy Epi-Pen Land. Worse, I think I know the exact moment my body decided to become steadily more intolerant of flying insect venom.

Like most of the long-lasting truly bullshit moments in my life, it happened while I was wearing camouflage.

It was evening at our home in Trego, the only property that we ever actually owned or truly approached being a ‘compound’ and paradoxically not the one that had the escape tunnels. A small squad of Oathkeepers had showed up to carpool with Stewart to an advanced small unit tactics class, and I had been conscripted to fill out a fire team for warm-up drills.

I had also been informed that I was going along to the class last minute, and I was not happy. We never trained regularly at home, making every outing for training an opportunity to fail and fumble in front of an audience. If Stewart was leading the class or practice, that meant being mocked from the sidelines which was not so very different from trying to do anything in my father’s eyeline. If there was another instructor, someone Stewart would want to impress or who would just maybe be irritated at having a clearly unskilled fumbling teen in a class explicitly for people with a tactical foundation to build on… That meant a blowup was inevitable.

I trudged into the woods in a loose-hanging surplus MARPAT uniform that still had some Marine’s name stitched on and my trusty Sig rifle with the bolt carrier safely removed, dreading the upcoming trip back. It was always fun to sit through the icy silence, braced for the  inevitable screaming rant about my failure to apply myself and reach my full potential that could last the entire way if he had downed enough 5 Hour Energy.

We split into teams with people I can’t remember and could never pick out of a paramilitary crowd, except that future J6C star witness and current author of the Colorado Switchblade Jason Tatenhove was in the other. We ran through drills that were in some way familiar to me: Moving as a group with designated areas of responsibility to watch for enemy contact or traps, bounding forward in teams of two with another providing covering fire, setting up a hasty ambush in an L shape to maximize the bullets going into the people you want to die and minimize chances of shooting your friend, and the catchily named Australian Peel which features fighters ‘peeling’ away from the enemy one man at a time to keep continuous fire as you break contact with the enemy.

(Sidenote: I tried to find videos illustrating these, but the best one on the Peel turned out to be from a channel whose host also has a national militia network with members at J6 and an accompanying rant video complaining about the FBI monitoring them. So much for that.)

That might sound impressive, but aside from actually being very basic there is a saying that sums up my entire experience in Militia World: Some people have ten years experience at a job, and some people have one year’s experience at a job ten times.

Stewart’s specialty was the introductory lesson, he had maybe two days of tactical wisdom derived from merging his half-remembered Airborne infantry training with passages from survival manuals and prepper tactical guides that littered our house and so never progressed with any training beyond the first step. This is because there was no intent to ever run a successful training program for my family or anyone else, only to impress and put on a show every few months for the sake of keeping up militia street cred.

Therefore, I slogged through the woods with all the smooth efficiency of a regular untactical Joe who’s seen some of these things in bank robbery movies.

It is also worth pointing out briefly, before we return to bees, that without working airsoft rifles we simply carried our rifles with essential parts removed so that they could not possibly fire. This had the advantage of being more realistic when it came to maneuvering with the weight and heft of your weapon, but it also meant pointing the gun and shouting “BANG BANG!” at imaginary foes like little kids playing army.

We had neighbors within a 2 minute walk. Mind you, this was Trego so hey were dysfunctional alcoholics who had screaming matches in their log house as often as we did in ours, helping us keep up OPERATIONAL SECURITY about our home life as we ignored each other, but it was around 9 PM when we started and some things are hard to tolerate. Imagine trying to relax in the evening on your porch, cracking open a second 20-pack of Natty Light and getting out the bong to get a good Montana summer crossfade going, when the militia family next door invites weirdos over to chase each other through the forest screaming “BANGITY-BANG,” “MOVING,” COVERING,” “CONTACT LEFT,” “PEELING RIGHT,” and “LAST MAN” into the woods at dusk.

My mom was mortified at the amount of shouting that she could hear from inside the house, and so was my little brother who’d been pressed into service to run through the woods as a mock opponent and try to sneak up on us in the trees.

The worst part is that they last forever, a dull repetition of the same basic lessons that would eat the entire night without getting me any closer to performing well in the upcoming special training.

I wasn’t counting on my friends, the bees.

Taking cover from the shouted bullets of the imaginary civil war, I crouched too close to a log that was unbeknownst to me someone’s happy little home. Bees really can’t fly at night, and it was nearly full dark, which may explain why I got none

 of the usual warnings: The intentionally annoying buzzing in a circle around your head, the extra loud swarming, the tiny bee headbutts when they’re really hoping you take the hint and go. Instead, they simply coordinated a multi-angle attack on all of my exposed skin and 10-12 fearless soldiers gave their lives to stab me simultaneously.

I can only guess how many more were lost to attempts to pierce my tactical gear, but their sacrifice was not in vain. I got the fuck away from their log.

I was of course mocked, but that was the order of the evening and not a huge surprise. I made my miserable trek out of the woods and once in the house left an actual trail of dying, eviscerated bees behind as they fell out of my militia ken doll outfit. Who knows how many I killed that day, preparing to fight for America against America after the inevitable end of America, but I did have what I wanted most in the world: An excuse not to go on the tactical adventure.

There are only so many times you can get the affected grave disappointment and dejected sighing at your failures from a parent before it just stops working, all the tactics eventually stopped working, and I was left behind as Stewart and Tatenhove sped off into the early morning light to go further their education in the post-collapse struggle.

Thanks to my friends, the bees.