Zzz tap. Zzz tap. Zzz tap.

If you do succeed in ignoring the wasp, it will suddenly take it upon itself to start zooming around the room, buzzing like a chain saw.

A fly can be equally annoying, especially when he decides to augment his window-bashing activity by periodically winging over to land on your face. You can swipe at him all you please, but you will never discourage him in the least. He zigzags and does loop-the-loops all around the room so he isn’t where you expect him to be when you lash out.

The more obnoxious the fly becomes, the more he seems to develop an individual personality. If one or two flies hang around long enough, I am apt to give them names like Sam and Bob.

A wasp never seems to develop an individual personality. wasps are like Imperial Stormtroopers from “Star Wars,” interchangeable agents of menace. Flies are irritating, wasps are scary.

You can see wasps outside the window, flying back and forth, attempting to get inside the house by crashing into the glass. After a wasp manages to gain entry, it will spend its time trying desperately to get back out again.

There is an unwritten insect rule, however, that however easily ingress was achieved, egress will be impossible. This will prove true even when the screen door right in front of the insect is wide open, with abundant sunshine and a nice little breeze coming through to advertise its function as an exit into the great outdoors.

Look, Sam! Look Bob! Look, Imperial Stormtrooper, don’t sting me, I’m just saying the door is open. Hell-bent as they are on getting out, these insects will ignore the yawning door.

More flies and wasps may fly in. Probably a June bug will come hurtling through to bang against the kitchen cupboards and fall to the floor. There, it will land upside down and futilely wave its legs around in the air. None will be able to find its way out.

I am pretty good at trapping an insect on the window pane under a drinking glass, sliding a piece of stiff paper underneath, and then letting my little captive go outside, but yesterday a wasp furiously battering against the paper managed to crawl underneath and fly back to the window. I caught it again and this time successfully launched it out into the air. My heart was pounding, but the wasp never looked back. At this point in its brief life it was more intent on mating or feeding or mud daubing or paper-nest-building or whatever its nature dictated than on stinging me. Thank heaven.

People, like bugs, can blunder into worlds where they don’t belong. Books and movies have been written about this. A character may purposely enter a social set where he feels like a fish out of water, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby.”

The genre may be fantasy, science fiction or horror, as in some of Ray Bradbury’s novels and short stories. In any case, the story involves someone entering another world, accidentally and unexpectedly or by design, with mixed results and then–like a bug–a fly or a wasp– being unable to find the door to leave again.

The new world may be a sterile and hostile environment for the gatecrasher. He or she may be unwelcome there. Its residents might even try to kill the intruder, or cage him or her for a pet. What were you expecting, Narnia?

In C. S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Lucy Pevensie, a little girl, discovers the door into the magical land of Narnia by crawling into a wardrobe in an English country house, and during the course of the seven novels that comprise the Chronicles, she and her sister and two brothers become Narnian queens and kings.

It doesn’t always turn out so well.

Rip Van Winkle, Lemuel Gulliver and Valentine Michael Smith of Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” among others, experience the phenomenon in different ways.

Most people who enter strange lands are fundamentally changed by the experience. It is seldom possible to take the Beatles’ advice and get back to where you once belonged.

I wonder if all of those authors were pestered by buzzing insects while they were trying to write.

Have a good week.