Palmetto bugs

I was both pleased and appalled to learn from Trane deVore that the large palmetto bug I once encountered in the dark is merely a large cockroach. I was remembering how they frantically scuttled & flipped over like VW bugs, and then noisily spun on their backs, buzzing like chainsaws when I turned on the kitchen light in the middle of the night at Roshi Aikin's zendo in Haiku, Maui, one summer evening a long, long time ago. 

Someone asks if I belonged to the Diamond zendo. It was a long time ago. And tequila of the first water was involved...verily, it was the holy water of choice—I sat zazen with Gary Snyder & Will Staple, yes. Diamonds on the souls of our shoes. I met poet-translator Roshi Aikin years later at a WS Merwin reading in Pasadena—and was floored when he remembered me! What else did he remember? Apparently my ¡Aha! moment of enlightenment took on bug form. How very Kafkaesque! Just leave some crumbs in the sink or the floor for me, please.