Are Locusts Next?

Part of the joy of doing construction is the never ending visitation of filthy insect beasts.

Our walls are completely closed. Yet today, while doing some fine spackling of the window molding, I turned around to see a monstrous water bug on the floor. Okay--it was a cockroach. You know---those huge ones that love water. They come in on dry days. I don't like them very much. Killed that fucker.

Then later on, after dinner, I came home and there was a spider the size of Tuscaloosa on the drywall right next to the left side of the window. It was chocolate brown and had two big eyes that were almost comical. It seemed to me they weren't eyes, actually, but some modified structures to make the spider look more beastly to would-be predators. Or maybe they were eyes. Who knows! Usually I just let spiders live. We get them in the house. The little tan ones. The pointy, striped black ones. Whatever. But this thing was so googly-eyed and so big and so nasty---I killed that fucker, too.

Then, I walked the dog and I came home and to the right side of the window there was a cricket. We almost never get crickets. And I thought, "Well, it's just a cricket." But then I had an immediate recall of a story my friend Bradford told me the other night about how his entire side yard is always swarming with crickets and how it's real noisy and like something out of a horror movie. I don't want this happening to us. One less cricket to breed---I killed that fucker and flushed him good.

Of the three beasts that I annihilated, the one that spooged the most juice was the cricket. You think it would have been the roach...but those big hard shelled roaches seem to retain their water in their carapace after the death crunch. The cricket just splattered into a puddle. The spider was, for sure, the creepiest. I made sure I had a big wad of toilet paper to pick up his dead ass. I didn't want any spider poison to touch my skin.