Disembodied Teeth

For the last month or so, something has been eating at me.

I mean, literally.

Here is where you have to clarify further that when you say "literally," you actually mean LITERALLY, because who does that anymore? It's unusual. Nonetheless, I, a writer who strives for clarity at all times, am, for lack of a better phrase, eaten alive; which is to say, not literally eaten alive (because in that case I would at this point be dead, and therefore no longer able to write about the experience), but figuratively eaten alive; or, literally, experiencing the condition of being eaten by something in a literal, yet (as yet) non-fatal fashion.

Hopefully that cleared everything up nicely.

Except my bites. I'd like to find something that would clear those up nicely, because something is eating me alive, figuratively speaking. They feel like mosquito bites, but I know they are not, inasmuch as I am not given to doing high kicks whilst going commando in a swamp. No, something is biting me in quite inappropriately personal places, and they feel like mosquito bites, and I never see what's doing it, and I would quite like it to stop. Thank you.

So anyway, I did some browsing around online (as you do) and came across this post, which includes every single symptom I'm experiencing, up to and including the scrabbling-around noises in the attic, which I've been attributing to squirrels.

Which are rodents. Last time I checked.

I'm not a taxonomist, but I know what I like, and what I don't like is being eaten alive by fucking rodent mites. So does anybody know a good exterminator?

Because I literally do not have time for this.

Here There Be Bugs

Probably just as well it's Friday.

Our section admin has been dismayed, lately, by an influx of very small, beige flying insects whose chief purpose in life is - as far as I can tell - simply to huddle against the walls, immobile, trying to look inconspicuous. Or so she tells us. No one else has been able to see these "insects."

Ha ha! Just kidding. No, we really do have some tiny tan bugs in our area; so Norma (our section admin) called ABC Pest Control to come out and spray a few weeks ago. They did. The bugs got bigger.

Now, if I were Norma, I think, perhaps I'd call a different company this time. But she did not - probably they have a low-bid contract and she can't. So they're coming back out this evening to try again. "Make sure and mark the places where you've seen the bugs," they told Norma. Do they doubt her?!

I can vouch for the existence of these bugs, but I can't help wondering what exactly the problem is. Here in my house I get those big, flying cockroaches, easily two to three inches long; and occasionally, just for laughs, they alight on your face in the middle of the night while you're sleeping. You wake up instantly at the sensation and fling the crawling thing away from you violently, heart racing spasmodically. In fact, the cardiac effect is so traumatic, I had to double-check my life insurance policy to be sure I had not somehow inadvertently named the cockroaches as beneficiaries.

I had not.

So I'm not sure what the big deal is about miniscule, mild-mannered, apparently non-homicidal beige wall-huggers, but Norma's on a rampage and the bugs have got to go. "Do you know," I said to her before snapping the above picture with my cell phone, "this kind of looks, um. How should I put this? A little demented."

She laughed. She put up some more signs.

"We used to get these incredibly tiny little fruit flies around our plants in TPP," I told her. "You'd see someone in their cubicle, just flailing randomly at the air," and I demonstrated. Later it occurred to me that one good way to tell a transportational state employee from a (ahem) normal one is simply whether anyone else can see the bugs. But in TPP, I don't think anybody could. I didn't tell Norma how I sometimes spent whole days just sitting at my desk, waiting, with bits of Scotch tape stuck to the ends of my fingers, catching fruit flies. I wasn't sure she'd understand.

Perhaps the bugs will be gone Monday, but I'd be surprised. Why should they be? And why shouldn't they be allowed to flourish in the lovely beige 1980s-era office setting we have so thoughtfully provided for them? If I were smart, I'd bring in my cockroaches, too.

Careful!

You know your workplace safety meeting has been a rampaging success when someone knocks his iced tea over onto the floor, scattering ice cubes everywhere, while getting up to receive an award. This, in turn, set off a chain reaction wherein I almost slipped and fell in the ice, Robbie nearly brained himself on the monitor hanging low from the ceiling above his chair, and one poor overwhelmed soul set off the alarm trying to get out the emergency exit. Safety first!

3-Martini Break Group alumni Andrew and Bryan now work at the campus where the morning meeting was held, so Robbie and I popped in for a visit afterwards. Bryan's cubicle neighbor had brought in a five-inch-long centipede he'd captured in his bathroom over the weekend. It was confined to a pint-sized terrarium on his desk, and it was Not Amused. It squirmed about restlessly inside, rattling its claws, poking its long, segmented feelers out the air holes on the top, and chittering in arthropodic fury.

Andrew and Bryan seemed uneasy, and I don't blame them. I'm not generally afraid of creepy-crawlies, but the sight of that thing triggered a deep-seated, primal urge to squish it as flat as possible, preferably using somebody else's shoe.

I'm also frightened of the enormous flying cockroaches that buzz around my kitchen late at night, serene in their undisputed dominion. Whacking those bastards with a shoe - anyone's shoe - only stuns them temporarily. I'm sorry, but that's just showing off. If you're able to weather a nuclear holocaust, at least have the courtesy to go "squelch" when you take a size 13 upside the thorax.

And they don't confine their activities to the kitchen, either. Last week one landed on me in bed just as I was nodding off. I don't know how many more times my heart can handle jumping from 65 to 300 beats per minute in the space of .005 seconds, but I'd really rather not find out.

Later Robbie and I had lunch with another 3MBG alum, Thomas, and discovered that the centipede is actually intended for him. For his wife, rather, who's an entomologist, and therefore much less of a weenie than I am. She works as a consultant for a pest-control company, so I was able to get a few pointers on how to deal with my enormous flying cockroach problem.

I think I can pretty much wipe them out by presenting one of them with a safety award.