We had a buddy from up North come down to visit us in Hobe Sound last week. Nice guy. Completely soft, but nice.

On his third night, we’re all sitting out on the patio around dusk, cracking open a few cold ones and enjoying the breeze. Now, any Floridian worth their salt knows that when the sun starts dipping near the mangroves, the invisible air-piranhas come out to play. The no-see-ums.

We’ve lived here so long our blood is basically 50% citronella; we barely notice ’em. But our buddy? He had no idea what was coming.

Suddenly, he stops mid-sentence and starts swatting at the empty air like he’s trying to fight a ghost.

“Hey,” he says, looking around all panicked, “Is something biting me?”

Me and the guys just looked at each other and started howling. I mean, deep, belly-shaking cackles. We didn’t pass him the bug spray; we just watched the show. Within two minutes, this grown man was doing a frantic, weeping interpretive dance across my patio, slapping his own neck and violently scratching his ankles into a bloody pulp.

“Ah, you met the no-see-ums, bud!” I told him, taking a slow sip of my beer. “You can’t see ’em, but boy, they see you.”

As we watched him spin around in circles trying to outrun an invisible swarm, my neighbor Ken leaned back in his lawn chair, took a drag of his cigar, and dropped some absolute geopolitical wisdom on the deck.

“You know,” Ken muttered, shaking his head at the spectacle, “the government got Guantanamo Bay all wrong. All those millions of dollars spent on high-tech interrogation tactics? Complete waste of taxpayer money.”

Our buddy paused his scratching for a second, wheezing. “What… what do you mean?”

“Simple,” Ken said. “They should’ve just brought the detainees right here to Hobe Sound. Build a cage right out by the water. Put ’em in it, completely naked, right at dusk. I guarantee you, within the first five minutes of being exposed to the no-see-ums, those guys would have told Uncle Sam everything they knew. They’d be singing like canaries just to get a squirt of Deep Woods Off!.”

Honestly, looking at our friend, Jim wasn’t wrong. Forget waterboarding. The threat of five minutes of Hobe Sound midges at sunset would break the most hardened operative on the planet.

We eventually showed some mercy and tossed him a bottle of calamine lotion, but the damage was done. He spent the rest of his vacation indoors, soaking in an oatmeal bath and looking at us through the window like we were psychopaths.

Welcome to Florida, man. Next time, bring pants. 🦟🍻