The Cicada Tea Experiment
A comedy article
by Mary Kitt-Neel  2,902  10
05/21/2011 11:47 AM 4149 views
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Just like Mom used to make.
In my part of the world, the 13-year cicadas have descended -- or rather, emerged from being underground for the past thirteen years. Their first task is to shed their confining shells so they can get down to the business of getting laid before they die en masse in a couple of weeks. If I tried to count how many disgusting cicada shells are in my yard, it would quickly require the use of scientific notation, and nobody wants that, so let's just say there's a metric crap-ton of them.
Here's what a female looks like after emerging from her husk, ready for some handsome male to drive up, perhaps in a Beetle, or maybe a Porsche Spyder, so they can have a few drinks (Grasshoppers?) and get on with the business of getting it on.
"My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard..."
I was thinking there ought to be some use for the eleventy-bazillion empty cicada husks laying around my yard, and it turns out there is. Chinese medical practitioners have used the husks of cicadas to treat everything from fever to rashes to what several Eastern medicine websites refer to as "evil wind." This sounded promising. In fact, there's a cicada husk preparation you can buy that's called "Eliminate Wind Powder from True Lineage."
However, it turns out that when they say "evil wind" they aren't talking about the pork rinds and cheap beer kind. They're talking about the actual wind, its evilness coming from blowing sand into your eyes and causing conjunctivitis. Oh well.
The good news is this stuff is supposed to be a pretty decent muscle relaxant, and I'm nothing if not uptight most of the time. So my conclusion was: If you can't beat 'em, grind 'em into powder and make tea from them.
To make this concoction, you need anywhere from three to nine grams of husks. Any pot dealer weights and measures aficionado can tell you that a penny weighs about three grams. So the first step would be collecting a crapload of empty cicada husks, since they weigh next to nothing. This task required trekking a good five or six paces from my front door and back:
Yeah, this shouldn't be the last thing you see before going to sleep at night.
To grind them into powder, I needed to dry them out. So I put them on a cookie sheet and set them outside to dry:
The cat slunk off in disgust. Should I have taken it as a bad sign?
Alas, the rain started up again, so I had to rely on modern conveniences to make this millennia-old cocktail: fifteen minutes in a 250 degree oven:
You'd avert your eyes too, if you were putting this in your oven.
After they're good and dry, the next step was grinding the husks up in a blender. And from there, it was just a matter of boiling it and cooking it down:
Strange brew, killin' what's inside of you...
The result can be set aside in the refrigerator until you've had a chance to forget that it used to be arthropod-shaped slough, and you're ready to be cured of your fevers / rashes / uptightness. I decided that a nice after-dinner brew Friday was in order, because there's nothing like ending the work week with ground up vermin husks.
I chose to drink it cold, on the theory that heat would only emphasize any unpleasant flavor. I took a deep draw: And now, it's vermin time.
The taste was very faint, slightly phlegm-like, and reminiscent of the smell you get when you put your nose right down in a cat's fur. I drank the mucousy liquid at about 6:45 p.m., and aside from having a curiously strong desire to read Kafka, the rest of the evening proceeded normally.
It didn't make me sleepy the way antihistamines do, but I definitely felt something. It was similar to the way you feel as a kid, when you've spent an entire summer day at the pool and go home worn out and slightly sunburnt. Sort of pleasant, actually.
I watched a couple of old episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and then Arrested Development, and was sound asleep by 10:00 p.m.
The next day, I felt rested, not the least bit queasy, and curiously relaxed. So in summary, I guess the experiment was a success. Cicada tea is an effective, all-natural muscle relaxant, with no unwanted side effects!
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Like This? Rate It!
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Hilarious
16 votes
4.5
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Funny
4 votes
3.0
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just plain Jeen 47,815  51
05/21/2011 04:58 PM
You're braver than I am, MKN. I found myself scratching my head while reading your article.
The craziest thing I've ever eaten (that I know of) was Raccoon. It wasn't for medicinal purposes.
When I was young, my grandparents had a garden that kept getting ravaged by raccoons. They set a trap and soon after, we had a raccoon BBQ. They never had a problem with raccoons again.
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Chuckleworthy
2 votes
2.5
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just plain Jeen 47,815 51
05/21/2011 04:59 PM
(It tasted like greasy chicken.)
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Funny
5 votes
3.8
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Mary Kitt-Neel 2,902 10
05/21/2011 06:32 PM
I figured if it was really unpleasant, the Rapture is today anyway, so no harm done. Well, I got 29 minutes left until we get Rickrolled by Ceiling Cat in the Sky. Gotta go try a few more bucket listy things.
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Chuckleworthy
4 votes
2.8
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Whistler 186,138 44
05/22/2011 03:55 AM
I like how Mary has to sit in the work chair and the cat gets the big comfy chair. And that cat looks like it KNOWS it, too.
Well done, Kitten Heels.
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Amusing
1 votes
1.0
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Midgets 96,156 48
05/22/2011 09:13 AM
I'm impressed just for the fact that any woman would drink that has to swallow.
You do, don't you?
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Funny
4 votes
3.5
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Mary Kitt-Neel 2,902 10
05/22/2011 09:51 AM
I promise you that every time I have ever drunk ground up chitin I have swallowed.
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Funny
5 votes
3.0
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Dogs Akimbo 211,626 32
05/22/2011 11:48 AM
This woman grinds up cicada husks and drinks it for our amusement, and someone gives her less than 5?
Keep this Shakespeare up and John's gonna bring back Jenni Mayer.
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Chuckleworthy
3 votes
2.0
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Midgets 96,156 48
05/22/2011 11:52 AM
You have a point.
But how come when Bill drinks the worm for our amusement we call him an alcoholic?
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Chuckleworthy
4 votes
2.5
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Dogs Akimbo 211,626 32
05/22/2011 12:48 PM
Bacause he's not as attractive.
You were supposed to have been taught this in third grade. Were you out sick that day?
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