(Originally written on the 13th of May, 2008)
I hate cockroaches.
I'm terrified of them. It's only roaches, not any other insect. It may have something to do with their slimy bodies or their hairy sharp-looking legs, but the most disturbing thing about cockroaches is knowing that for every cockroach you see there are always dozens more hiding away. They’re like ninjas in that way.
To a normal person with a fairly clean house this fear would not be much of a problem. However, although I have a fairly clean house I am apparently not a normal person. Normal people don't have cockroaches appear on them at random times for no reason.
I've had a cockroach suddenly appear on my arm while I was taking a whiz in the jungle which resulted in frantic brushing off of the area for the next few hours every time I felt a movement, I've had one crawl up my thigh towards my manparts which resulted in frenzied slapping and more brushing, and I've had one drop on my shoulder while I was changing my shirt which has led me to conclude that there is something about me that cockroaches seem to find irresistible.
One night as I was exiting the shower I saw something scuttling across the bathroom floor. Without my glasses I could only just make out that it was a cockroach, and a pretty big one at that. I was absolutely mortified when I realized what I was looking at since these things have a history of crawling on me and now I am totally naked.
Panic took hold of me. The roach was too close to my glasses for me to risk grabbing them, so I sprang for the nearest weapon, which happened to be a bottle of heavy duty toilet bowl cleaner. I decided that it would be easier for me to poison the bastard than crush him with the bottle, so I unscrewed the cap and squirted the cleaning fluid with as much precision as I could manage without my glasses (which is not much precision at all). The roach ran from one side to the other and I traced its path with a blue trail of cleaning fluid across the tiles. The roach then scuttled under the door and out into the bedroom.
I had lost. The roach had escaped to terrify me another day, and I was left with a whole bunch of cleaning fluid to mop up. I put on my glasses and was about to start cleaning up the mess I made when I heard a meow.
My cat is the best cat that a guy who hates cockroaches could want. I’ll wake up some mornings and find hairy sharp-looking legs strewn across the living room floor and a limbless, chewed-up cockroach corpse under a chair or table. He likes to bat them around a bit before he tries to eat them, you see. It’s not just cockroaches that he hunts down and kills; one time I came home to find a dead pigeon in my bed and my cat next to it. He was pretty pleased with himself after that one.
Anyway, I looked in the direction of the meow and sure enough my cat was batting at the now belly-up roach. So I did manage to poison the bastard. Usually I’d leave the roach to suffer and die but my cat was in the room and I didn’t want him to start chewing on the toxic carcass so I decided that I had to get rid of it soon.
I shooed my cat away and threw some toilet paper on the writhing roach. Its flailing legs moved the paper around a bit, but it didn’t manage to uncover itself. I smacked the bottle of cleaning fluid on top of the paper and heard a crunch and a stain appeared on the paper. I kept hammering the paper with the bottle long after the roach would’ve been dead and then hammered some more. I picked up what was now nothing more than guts and crushed bits of exoskeleton in yet more toilet paper and flushed it away.
After washing my hands and putting on my jammies I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tight over myself while my cat kept watch on the bedside to ensure no cockroaches would be crawling over me at night.
I hate cockroaches.
I'm terrified of them. It's only roaches, not any other insect. It may have something to do with their slimy bodies or their hairy sharp-looking legs, but the most disturbing thing about cockroaches is knowing that for every cockroach you see there are always dozens more hiding away. They’re like ninjas in that way.
To a normal person with a fairly clean house this fear would not be much of a problem. However, although I have a fairly clean house I am apparently not a normal person. Normal people don't have cockroaches appear on them at random times for no reason.
I've had a cockroach suddenly appear on my arm while I was taking a whiz in the jungle which resulted in frantic brushing off of the area for the next few hours every time I felt a movement, I've had one crawl up my thigh towards my manparts which resulted in frenzied slapping and more brushing, and I've had one drop on my shoulder while I was changing my shirt which has led me to conclude that there is something about me that cockroaches seem to find irresistible.
One night as I was exiting the shower I saw something scuttling across the bathroom floor. Without my glasses I could only just make out that it was a cockroach, and a pretty big one at that. I was absolutely mortified when I realized what I was looking at since these things have a history of crawling on me and now I am totally naked.
Panic took hold of me. The roach was too close to my glasses for me to risk grabbing them, so I sprang for the nearest weapon, which happened to be a bottle of heavy duty toilet bowl cleaner. I decided that it would be easier for me to poison the bastard than crush him with the bottle, so I unscrewed the cap and squirted the cleaning fluid with as much precision as I could manage without my glasses (which is not much precision at all). The roach ran from one side to the other and I traced its path with a blue trail of cleaning fluid across the tiles. The roach then scuttled under the door and out into the bedroom.
I had lost. The roach had escaped to terrify me another day, and I was left with a whole bunch of cleaning fluid to mop up. I put on my glasses and was about to start cleaning up the mess I made when I heard a meow.
My cat is the best cat that a guy who hates cockroaches could want. I’ll wake up some mornings and find hairy sharp-looking legs strewn across the living room floor and a limbless, chewed-up cockroach corpse under a chair or table. He likes to bat them around a bit before he tries to eat them, you see. It’s not just cockroaches that he hunts down and kills; one time I came home to find a dead pigeon in my bed and my cat next to it. He was pretty pleased with himself after that one.
Anyway, I looked in the direction of the meow and sure enough my cat was batting at the now belly-up roach. So I did manage to poison the bastard. Usually I’d leave the roach to suffer and die but my cat was in the room and I didn’t want him to start chewing on the toxic carcass so I decided that I had to get rid of it soon.
I shooed my cat away and threw some toilet paper on the writhing roach. Its flailing legs moved the paper around a bit, but it didn’t manage to uncover itself. I smacked the bottle of cleaning fluid on top of the paper and heard a crunch and a stain appeared on the paper. I kept hammering the paper with the bottle long after the roach would’ve been dead and then hammered some more. I picked up what was now nothing more than guts and crushed bits of exoskeleton in yet more toilet paper and flushed it away.
After washing my hands and putting on my jammies I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tight over myself while my cat kept watch on the bedside to ensure no cockroaches would be crawling over me at night.
Wow, this was kind of a touching story.. I'm fine with all insects, except cockroaches. Well, beatles and tarantuals are terryfying.But common insects like daddy long longs, flys, moths, I can handle and I'm even brave enough to kill small tiny spiders with my bare hands. But when I saw a cockraoch move across my perfect white marble bathroom floor I freaked out and actually called my dad and begged him to leave work to go kill the cockroach. But by the time back I finished the un-seccseful phone call, the cockroach had already vanished. So when 1 month later I had my second encounter (with hopefully the same roach I saw the first time) I went into terminator mode. It became my life mission to kill that roach, I was not about to let it escape again. And so the persue of the cockraoch for the next 3 hours again. I was terrified of cleaning up a mushed cockroach I decided to kill it with chemicals. The Chosen Combo? Shower Cleaner, CLR, Ajax, Draino, and Clorox. It was such a lethal substance that the plastic container I was mixing it in began to melt a little bit from all the acid. And so I basicly poisened the cockroach to death, and even after it lay it's little legs iup in the air with defeat I kept spraying it just to make sure it wasn't just trying to trick me and then come to life the moment I dissapeared. But the best part of the roach incedent was leaving the whole mess there for my dad to clean it up. There's just a certain satisfaction to show him that if he had driven home from work to kill the roach all of this could have been avoided.
ReplyDeleteI have a cat too, but i don't let her go anywhere near insects, if my cat licked me anywhere before a year that it was a munching a cockroach I would probably make the both of use take a hand sanitizer bath. And if I found a dead pidgeon in my bed I would just move. Leave everything I had in that house and never even drive past it again. I guess the screwed up part of the story is that I couldn't eat for 3 days because I had breathed in too much chemicals and fainted twice from low blood sugar. Or that an ozone layer was burned down from those chemicals. But it was that I threw away everything in the bathroom, not because it swam in a sea of deadly toxins, but because the cockroach had scuttled across it.