It occurred to me this morning as I awoke, desperate for a column idea and the deadline-clock ticking away, that all these thousands of people moving to Florida everyday have no idea what wonderful bugs we have. That Florida could easily be the bug capital of the world.

We breed ‘em big, we grow ‘em ugly, and we make sure there are plenty to go around. “Twenty bugs for every man, woman and child,” goes the state motto, “and double on Sunday.”

This “occurred” to me as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. I was greeted by a silverfish the size of an engorged tuna. He emerged from the shadows and asked if I could spare any cottage cheese.

I hate silverfish — I don’t think they’re fish at all — and I put a lickin’ on him. For a third generation Floridian, it’s a typical morning: Throw a bagel in the toaster, start the coffee and do battle with the arthropods. It’s a way of life, and many a song have chronicled these great crusades.

I’ve never lived in any other states, but I don’t think there’s anywhere else where bugs are as par for the course. So accepted, not fashionably, but just as something we have to put up with. There’s your Uncle Eddy, and the cockroach. You invite both to Christmas, and you endure the bad jokes and how they creep up on you in the middle of the night when you’re using the bathroom.

Fact is, Florida has bugs like no other state. And I don’t think most people moving down here know that.

Most aren’t pretty bugs — palmetto bugs, cicadas, predatory stink bugs, fruit flys, cabbage loopers, fungus gnats, chinch bugs, leaf miners, no-see-ums, Southern pine beetles, brown recluse spiders, spittlebugs. Spittlebugs?

Some of these insects you might find in other states, but I bet they don’t have the same spunk as our Florida variety. Everything here has more character. They’re redneck bugs. They speak with a twang. They’re Jimmy Buffet bugs, in surfer shorts and drinking margaritas. Bugs in pickup trucks. Bugs with attitude. Bugs that would scare a lady’s hair straight and send a dog up a tree.

Ever seen a banana spider? It’s the kind of creature that will make you give up eyesight. Long legs like skeletal fingers. More hair than I have, and I’m Cuban/Sicilian! And always in locations that keep them hidden until you’re pressing through the bushes, turning your head and then, “Hell-o!”

Close encounter of the arachnid kind. Nothing like a little nose nuzzle on the fuzzy belly of a banana spider.

This is a state where cockroaches are the size of minivans and where they leave breakfast orders in the kitchen. The cockroach is so plentiful, they have their own representative in Tallahassee.

There are of course termites, an insect uncommon up north where wood lasts for centuries, not just 20 minutes. Once, I had a termite eat a hole straight through one of my books. It was a good book, so I flipped through the pages until I found him. He’s no longer among us.

I consider myself a Grade A mosquito killer, which means if I get bitten, I get so consumed with hunting the offending insect, I will track it for days and then torture it for hours.

Let’s be fare: There are also a lot of good bugs out there. My wife came home from the nursery the other day with a package that held more than 1,500 lady bugs. We watered the yard — they come out of their slumber mighty thirsty — and spent the early evening carefully releasing them into the world. It was actually a pretty enjoyable, and even wonderful time. “Go in peace,” I told them.

It could have gone on all night. Then the clicking and swarming and buzzing returned, and we retreated to the bedroom. I needed my rest so I could do battle again in the morning.

It was just sitting there in my brother’s backyard, rotting, decaying — no longer so much a vehicle as a potting bench. It was like some rusted and forgotten object of war, discarded in a jungle somewhere. Once a clunker, now an overgrown heap.

If I’m not mistaken, it was a 1964 Volvo, with its rounded pug-nose and long hatchback.

I say “was” because it had long left this earth. Leaves covered up the sides and hood, rust had threatened to detach the body from the frame and a tire was not only flat, but off the rim.

When Ernie, our buddy, and a former roommate of my brother’s, packed up to leave for New Zealand, he parked the Volvo in my brother’s backyard. None of us, including Ernie, thought he would stay so long. But he’s since been named prime minister, and looks to be there until the New Zealanders come to their senses and ask him to go explore another country.

That said, my brother Scott decided to take action. Part of that was due to his girlfriend, Holly, who told him that few gardens she admired ever had Volvos in the middle of them.

Scott can be a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. Besides, he was starting to feel the same way. Too long he had tried to tell people the partially buried car was an Indian burial mound.

But it’s no easy task moving a petrified Volvo that had sunk roots deep into the ground.

I had proposed a number of ways to get rid of it, for instance, borrowing the jaws of life from the fire department.

I could just picture us down there talking it over with the chief. “But we’ll bring it back in five minutes!”

Our buddy George got in on it, too, and didn’t like my idea. Even less did he care for my suggestion of taking a blowtorch to the car, cutting it into pieces and leaving out for the garbage pickup.

George stared at me, almost angry. “The whole backyard is covered in sawdust, woodchips, leaves and who-knows-what-else-your-brother-poured-out-there. Gasoline isn’t as flammable as that backyard. It’s a Hindenburg!”

He had a point.

But how to get it out? First we had to move our two ‘65 Mustangs, neither running so well. And then came the main attraction. George went to start it with the magical device — a screwdriver inserted into the ignition, which dangled like a dashboard ornament.

When he didn’t see even the faintest light on the dash, he poked his head under the hood, his eyes darting around.

“A-ha,” he said, and emerged with a dangling battery cable swinging free. “Could be that’s the problem.” With little fanfare and a quick poke, he jammed the wire into a hole, and Eureka! There was light. That’s how it went with Ernie.

With the screwdriver back in the hanging ignition, and despite the fact that after sitting for almost two years (George was convinced the gasoline had long since turned to varnish), it puttered once and then purred to life.

“Well, I’ll be,” I said.

Not that it was easygoing now. The clutch had departed the earth, and it sounded like an asthmatic wood chipper trying to get it into gear. Luckily George had once driven a car for months without a clutch, and knew how to start it already in gear. It’s the see-where-it-takes-you method, and it took him straight into a wood pile.

Suddenly, with the car alive, all talk has turned from having it hauled off to the scrap heap to now to getting it road worthy again.

My brother wants to turn it into a rally car. George thinks it’s the perfect weekend mobile. I myself think it made a better planter, but who am I to say? Ernie, if you’re reading this, send the title soon. The boys want to take your baby out to play. And Holly, I don’t think you’re rid of a Volvo yet.

And so the end is near. I can see it, just over there on the horizon — the end of the semester.

When you work at a college, years are no longer years. They’re semesters. And semesters fly by like someone’s yanking them away with string.

They start out slow, gain speed and roar out of sight before you can say, “What the heck’s a semester?”

And when they end, they take a whole new crop of kids with them, headed for the real world to claim jobs, make families and wonder for the rest of their lives how they could have run up $20,000 in pizza debt.

This semester I’m losing a bunch of them. My kids. I’ve been with Flagler College almost two years now, and my office runs the student newspaper. So I’ve got a chance to get to know a bunch of them, and it’s getting me a little misty thinking about them going away.

What will I do with my time? Work?

All day they pop into my office, dropping their bodies in a chair like you dump clean laundry on the bed. Sometimes they sigh or stare. Rarely do they have anything important to say, and usually I’m in the middle of some panic attack or crisis involving mass quantities of money I shouldn’t have spent. I speak fast like my calf is brushing up against an exposed electrical wire.

“What’sup?how’sitgoing?Youdoingalright.Goodgoodgood.Nowwhattheheckdoyouwantanditbetterbeimportantbecauseifitisn’tI’mcallingsecurity … again.”

They don’t have anything important to say because they’re college kids and the world is a giant pool of inexpensive time that can be spent at their leisure.

They touch things on my desk and ask about various items.

“What’s this?” they say.

“That’s a paperclip.”

“What’s this?”

“That’s the court order requiring you to leave my desk alone.”

I get important sounding phone calls, cover the speaker and say things like, “I really need to take this.”

“No problem,” is the answer. “Got all the time in the world.”

Of course they do. That’s how I was when I was in school. There was something truly wonderful about hanging out in someone’s office, knowing that they couldn’t get any work done, and making them answer ridiculous question after ridiculous question, like: “So what’s it like being that old?” or “Is it true that as you age and hair grows in your ears you can hear it rustle?”

Now they ask things like that of me.

I like to think I have wisdom to impart. The other night during the student newspaper layout, I helped a girl burn a music CD.

“Aren’t you embarrassed?” I asked her. “You’re the youth of America with all your technological savvy. Yet you need help from Dinosaur Sam.”

Sometimes I have really wonderful things to tell them, and say it, and they appear to listen, and I think to myself, this is fantastic, we really made a connection, and I might have just changed a young person’s life, to which they respond, “Did you know you actually have two parts in your hair today” or “that sideburn is longer than the other.”

I’m going to miss this bunch. How I’ve come up with the perfect nicknames for them: Heffery instead of Jeffery, The Hippie Twins, Moody Lou, Buzzhead, Mrs. Drama Queen, Ugh!, Guy whose name I don’t know and Eddie. There are others.

I’ll miss how they don’t ever do anything I say, and laugh when I get mad. The more mad I get, the more they laugh, and eventually I go home and have a good cry.

How they think I must be really important because I have a water cooler in my office.

“So you buy that with your expense account?” they ask.

“No, it fell off a truck I was riding behind.”

They’re a good bunch, and I’m gonna’ miss them all. Soon I’ll begin training new ones, and answering new questions about paperclips and why my hair parts like it does. But will it ever be the same again? I hope so.

Is nothing sacred anymore? Apparently not. Now, I’m not naïve. I understand the world is run by money, marketing and the consumption of Cheese Doodles. But I want it to be about something more meaningful.

Not people selling the rights to their names on eBay. eBay, that part circus, part flea market where people sell everything from Aunt Nelly’s gnome collection to body parts.

Now the new fad seems to be people auctioning off names, as Matthew Jean Rouse is doing.

Matthew Jean, a 31-year-old father of two, doesn’t like his middle name. According to The Associated Press, he wants to let someone in the general public give him a new one, and he’s asking big bucks for it. As of press time, someone who doesn’t understand the value of money has bid $2,175.

“If he wants to walk around with ‘Fool’ as his middle name, that’s his problem,” Rouse’s wife told AP. “If someone changes his name to ‘Poophead,’ he may decide it’s a little more important than he thought.”

I hope someone does name him “Poophead.” I hope someone names him “chicken legs” or “stinky behind.” I hope someone names him “slap me.”

There comes a point where you go too far, and Matthew Lugnut Rouse has reached it.

Terry Iligan, a 33-year-old mother of five from Knoxville (a place that I would now recommend not drinking the water), sold her entire name on eBay for $15,199. You can officially call her “GoldenPalace.com,” after the online casino. GoldenPalace.com, you may recall — if you have the amount of spare time that I obviously have — is the same company that bought a temporary tattoo on a pregnant woman’s belly for $8,800, a grilled cheese sandwich with the image of the Virgin Mary on it for $28,000, and a guy running for governor of Ohio for $900.

If a grilled cheese sandwich sells for 28 grand, and a potential governor can’t even sell for a thousand, what does that say about Ohio?

I digress and mix-up my point, which is: How can you change your name to Goldenpalace.com! What will your kids say? How will it sound when they call you in at the doctor’s office? Does that make “.com” your last name?

As the good former journalist that I am, I did some research and found quite a few people on eBay trying to sell their names, many with varying degrees of success.

Poor Joshua Graves, who has never had a middle name, just wanted someone to pick one for him … at a starting bid of $750. Alas, no one had put in a single bid. Joshua, you’re middle name is “Goofledanger.”

Another guy was offering the rights to rename his dog’s middle name. The dog’s current name is “Buddy Lee Sutherland.” Two bids so far, and the high bid is $1.25. The shipping costs, and I don’t understand this, are $1. Good luck Buddy Lee. I hope they don’t pick “Duddy” or “Got Snipped.”

I never found Mr. Rouse’s auction, so maybe he’s already sold to the highest bidder. Maybe his wife got it and he’s now “Matthew Clean the Dang Garage or You’re Living Out There Rouse.”

But what is this world coming to? Is nothing sacred anymore? Shoot, once upon a time, people went out and got tattoos of skulls and crossbones, sleazy women and sayings like, “I just beat up your kid brother.”

Now they sell those rights to companies who want to tattoo their brand on them.

People are taking on names like Taco Palace and Honey’s House of Chicken. It’s a strange world out there and it seems like everything that can be sold is up for sale. It’s a sad, sad time in America, and I’m ashamed.

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This column brought to you by Eddie’s Shrimp Shack and Tackle Store.