wild life

Little gross creepy crawlies have taken to squeezing through the place where the floor meets the outside wall in my front room. GROSS. GROSS GROSS GROSS! They are simple-minded, pathetic little beasties that don't understand who they have chosen to invade. Their lives are ridiculous. It's almost laughable, how lame and unrealistic their dreams and goals are. Almost laughable. But mostly just gross. It reminds me of when I had the Screaming, Flying Cockroach problem in my compartment in Japan. I went from horrified - unable to sleep, roaming the streets of my neighborhood until I gathered courage to sleep in a tiny ball on the bathmat, the farthest point from which I had seen it - to trying to humiliate it. "You are so stupid and pathetic. You can't do anything fun. Why do you bother? Your brain is a joke," etc. Then I would be at work and imagine it lounging on my "chair" (a term I coined to loosely represent the thing I put on the floor and then sat on sometimes) and watching my T.V., not cleaning up after itself, just an annoying houseguest of the peskiest sort. This gave way to a total giving in on my "I don't use chemicals in my home" stance, and I staged a full-on bug bomb attack. I moved all my things into the closet, as best I could, set off the bomb of chemical doom, then took off to a friend's house for the night. The next afternoon, it wasn't nearly as nuclear holocaust-like as I had imagined, but it was eerily quiet. I couldn't hear any high-pitched screams. The houseguest seemed to be gone. A short time later, I heard a neighbor lady screaming, "GOKIBURI!" Which means cockroach. I apparently drove it into her apartment.

I don't want to drive my current critters (which I'm reluctant to fully describe, because I'm already in their existential throes enough as it is) into the home of the couple that just moved in next door. They seem super nice. I wish I could send them straight to Frat Boy's place upstairs. That would be great. But I get the sense that these losers stay pretty low down.

The bug bomb, by the by, didn't get rid of my little frenemy altogether. One summer night, a season or more later, I heard the inimitable high-pitched scream and I knew. I found it and, psychological horror now truly piqued, went toward it with my upraised shoe. Is there anything more horrible, really? The thing was huge and hard. Whacking it with a shoe would have been like bludgeoning a small mammal to death with a stapler or something. But I was determined to off the motherfucker. As I approached it, it let out a blood-curdling scream and leapt at my face. I screamed like hell and ran, out the door, down the apartment building stairs, to the curb, dialed my unsuspecting boyfriend, and then waited an hour for him to drive across town to fetch me. Neighbors looked at me funny, or funnier than usual. I smiled weakly and said, "Gokiburi."

It wasn't even because of my current creepies, but I switched around my bedroom and my "office." I now sleep in the small room whose window is not easily accessible to anyone walking by outside, and my office is all big and spacious and I can open the blinds because I don't care who sees me working on my computer versus sleeping in my skivvies. I am keeping the bedroom really bedroomy. That's right - no extraneous whatnot unrelated to sleep. I've decided to use my summer leisure to do a study on sleep, with me as the subject. Does all that wacky good-night's-sleep advice work? I was planning on starting last night, but I got involved in something. I made myself wake up early today so I'll be all ready to start tonight.

I'm also going to buy a new bed. I'm in research mode. The problem is that the bed I want is the one pictured here. It is not a bed that just anyone can have. It is not a bed for a regular person of regular means. But it is the most beautiful bed I have ever seen. All beds should follow suit. Now I have this in my head and nothing is going to seem right.