I Hate Cockroaches

So there I was, minding my own damn business at 10:56 PM (22:56 for people in smart countries), trying to put some milk into a glass to be put in the microwave oven so I could get to sleep, when my brother walks in and says: "Whoa, a cockroach!"

So there it was. A big, fat, hyperactive cockroach, as if on cue, buzzed off the table and under the fridge. "Great," thought I, "that's gross, but at least now I have an excuse to not go after it." What a fool I was. It crawled up the side of the fridge and promptly flew past my face onto the stove top, at which point I resolved that it was my manly duty to try and squish the thing with a paper towel and throw it in the trash, after which I would take a shower and wash myself with bleach out of disgust.

So there we were. Man and cockroach. Strength against speed. Paper towels matched against one of nature's most successfully adapted gross things.

The odds were not in my favor.

I made my first lunge, and my first mistake. In my haste, I must have blinked or looked away, because it scuttled off just inches away from where I had aimed. That was the blunder that ruined everything: now it knew that I was after it, and so it ran behind the jar of sugar, and waited. Damn. Now I had to reach out with my unarmed hand to pull the jar away so it would come out into the open again.

I pulled the jar towards me, and it scuttled out just as I knew it would. But then something disastrous happened, something that would show me just how badly I blundered by missing it the first chance I had.

It hid under a napkin, behind a cake stand.

I knew then that I was defeated, that the little fucker was beyond my power to destroy. But I had to try: using the back end of a flyswatter, I pulled the napkin away, prepared to remedy the mistake I had made by missing it thirty seconds before. All for naught; that six-legged piece of shit ran across the countertop, over the edge, and into an open drawer.

It's still there. Plotting, waving those creepy antennae around. I failed to destroy it, I've doomed us all. There's nothing left to do but fill the house with bug bombs and light it on fire. Then there'll be nothing left to do but get drunk.

Accursed fate, why dost thou torment me so?!

Reasons I don't like Texas, #236: If everything is bigger in Texas, then fuck that! I refuse to go anyplace where the cockroaches are any bigger than their already-intolerable size everywhere else.