Truesday: Just Beyond Our Line of Sight

Yes, that sentence was unnecessarily run-onish with far too many ‘ands’, but the thought remains cohesive. German roaches = nasty + paranoia (of one variety or another). So there’s that.

The other variety of roach is the TREE roach (in other southern states, these are referred to as “palmetto bugs” or “water bugs”). These are those horrifying, phone-sized monsters which when they choose to fly into someone’s hair, may cause that person to beat themselves retarded out of blind fear. They typically don’t actually live in your house (too cold, if you use a/c), but they’ve likely visited you just to deliver you the favor of dying, legs straight up in the air, in some prime spot on your floor where a one-night-stand is the first to see it and freaks the fuck out, thus denying you the naked time you’d been really witty to earn.

That, or they appear to live solely to torture your girlfriend who can spot them from fifty yards away, and is absolutely scared shitless of them.

My crib is really small. Like, 700 square feet small (this ain’t New York or Paris, so that shit’s SMALL). And in a place that small, one tends to want things miniaturized in order to get a “feel” for a bigger place. Like an optical illusion. The pictures on the wall are slightly smaller than normal. So is the stove, the couch, the area rug, coffee table, everything is just a tad discounted in dimension. Like a dollhouse, everything's shrunken to fit the model.

Everything but the goddamn roaches.

For a year now it’s been a strange coexistence with these beasts of inconvenience. It’s not like I’d crack open a box of cereal and they’d pour out in a waterfall of crippling disappointment. Or that they’d even be found in the kitchen at all. Normally I’d find one pathetically backstroking on the floor tile in my hallway, and then dispose of it neatly. But every once in a while there’d be an adventurous fucker that would show up on the ceiling above our bed, as we were going to sleep, threatening to drop down like some crazed black-ops periplaneta. All hell would break loose for an hour or so until I could get the thing quarantined and dismissed. Neither of us would sleep for an hour after that.

But those experiences were pretty scattered. Until about a week ago.

Maybe it's the cold weather. My new cologne? Maybe it was the New Hampshire primaries. Regardless, I simply went about disposing of the dead shits as always. The only change to my regular routine was that I'd taken to getting up a bit earlier than my girlfriend so that she would not have to witness anything that would scar her or keep her from ever touching the floor without shoes again. And it was a daily thing, the sweeping of at least one roach. It was seriously starting to bother me.

Enter: my inadvertant bathroom remodel. I say "inadvertant" because sometimes you try and replace one cabinet and in the process you end up breaking a towel bar, which needs to be moved anyway because the original location was inconvenient. But in doing so, you crack the wall mirror, which is a model no longer available (proportionally small, just like rest of dollhouse), and before you know it you're ripping out walls with tile bits reflecting off your face, and yelling about butterflies flapping their wings.

It was within this process that I believe I found my paw's thorn.

In my excitement to destroy, my crowbar curled over a particularly mushy edge of shower wall. I tugged, and it relented with discomforting ease. Just fell off the wall. As the patch of tile + drywall pathetically crumpled to the floor, I could see that the once-greenish insulation behind it was slick black, damp, and absolutely covered with roach bits, chew holes, and egg casings. The smell was formidable, and could not be covered by half a bottle of Febreeze, which I sprayed only after emptying half a bottle of insect killer on the entire wall.

HOLY SWEET JESUS SHIT NASTY.

I'm not entirely sure how I should take the whole event. It caused me to rip the entire wall out, exposing me to the outside world, just to try and bring an end to the illegal border crossing. A WHOLE WALL. Roaches? Now birds and bears, drunks neighbors and shit can come die on my floor.

But will it work? Is the wall really my problem? Won't they just move elsewhere? Should I simply learn to live in harmony with them? Can't I convince my girlfriend that they aren't as evil as the German ones? Is that even true? Does any of this fucking matter given that I don't know how to hang dry wall or tile or fix plumbing or anything remotely craftsman-ish?

Probably not. I'm just your average guy who wants to be left alone, and doesn't like cleaning up dead roaches every goddamn morning so he cuts out an entire wall to spite his home. That's all.