Don’t think this reflects poorly on your company, dear reader, but I drifted off to sleep within minutes of writing to you, clipboard in hand and pillow tucked snugly under my head. Obviously I don’t expect you to sing and dance and excite me, all the while tossing ribbons in the air, and in fact I’m often compelled to entertain you.
Here’s the question for tonight: dare we rock the boat and implement a forum of some sort? I used to believe meaningful interaction required a room, or at least a table and chairs, yet I’m told things have changed. There are free ways to create our own summit. There are also, if I may use the parlance of the Web, feature-rich discussion boards, smatterings of code that promise to rub you down while you’re typing. For a price, of course.
You know what? It might be worth it. There are days when our parlor fills with damn near a hundred people–real live human begins, in addition to the mannequins I bribe to boost readership–and it’s a prospect both welcome and unsettling. We’re not talking “hits,” mind you, we’re talking two hundred eyeballs, which I plan to harvest eventually for my unholy plans.
It’s welcome because what we discuss clearly needs to be proselytized. Unsettling, because I still harbor suspicions that two of you in the back row drive Hummers, walk your pet centipedes twice daily, kill on sight, count every corner in your bedrooms before going to sleep, and continue to amass uncensored pictures of hobbit feet. Yes, naked, hairy depictions of Shirefolk toes, the true cause for Sauron’s unquenchable thirst.
I also have another concern, a nameless terror made real whenever I skim the IMDB forums for who knows what reasons. Forums tend to attract idiocy as if it were an undiscovered currency, and this I cannot encourage. We are caught, it seems, in a dilemma.
Would it be unreasonable to claim, under most circumstances, life isn’t terribly exciting? The screenplay to my reality doesn’t parallel the tortuous surprises of a daytime talk show, nor does it offer explosions and plumes of gutwrenching adrenaline. No, any drama is probably manufactured–made, with so many pints of elbow grease, to supplement a mundane existence.
Would it be so preposterous of me to ask for a normal, relaxing shower, then? I’m talking shampoo, hot water, and, maybe as a perk, not being hounded by the very spawn of hell. Just a thought. Soap, facewash, shampoo, rinse: you too have a routine and follow it you must, lest you wake up in a toilet.
Where precisely the house centipede should fit into my showering sequence, I don’t really know, but the crawlie sure as heck situated itself somewhere between the first two steps. All I can tell you is I have a shelf for my toiletries, and I saw something move on this ledge when I reached for the soap. I leaned in for a closer look, only to recognize the telltale band of yellow.
My mortal foe had returned after months of plotting its insidious devices.
“Holy sh–” I yelped, putting on my glasses and leaping out of the tub.
I quickly took a sponge, soaked it with hot water, and drowned the bugger in liquid justice. Its legs curled in futile defiance before it died a noble death on the tile. Or so I thought. Indeed, as serenely as it lie, as treacherously as it waited, poison still coursed proudly through its foul little body. I turned my back for a moment and it was gone.
The shower head! What a perfect weapon. I pointed it toward the ledge for a solid minute, rinsing away my irrational fears. Something floated off the shelf, a bug corpse without any legs. I stepped back in the shower. Strange, I thought, how did it lose all its legs?
The short answer? It was a decoy. Yes, my crafty adversary had used the corpse of another insect.
Unfortunately for me, I discovered this when I went for my shampoo. Something moved. Again. Except this time, my goddamn glasses were partially fogged. Were my eyes deceiving me? I removed my glasses. Couldn’t see a thing, and I sure wasn’t going to lean any closer. I wiped my glasses clear and, right before they fogged up again, I saw it. The house centipede had returned, insolent as ever and no worse for wear.
“YOU WANNA PLAY BALL, FUCKER?” I shouted.
I leapt out of the shower again, grabbed my towel, and found my bottle of Lime Away. There would be no dawn for this centipede. I sprayed once. It reeled. I sprayed twice. It slowed to a crawl. I sprayed a poetic third time. Absolution was mine.
I also walked into a fern at the mattress store over the weekend. I’m pretty sure there was a time when gracefulness came easily, but my stock’s been depleted. Guess it’s time to go to Wal-Mart.
They’re back, and here’s a visual morsel for those of you given to pretty images. I chose carefully and settled on an austere diagram that probably came straight from da Vinci’s notebook, so enjoy.
Fig. 1 A poisonous dog
The Internet widens our embrace significantly, welcoming and enumerating people alien and novel to us. For instance, there are entomologists, experts who study insects. Hot she-entomologists, I’d even wager. And then there’s the one unwashed fellow who not only collects house centipedes, but fawns over them as well, reading them bedtime stories and tying ribbons on their legs and individually kissing their thousand lips. If your eyebrows just perked up in a flash of self-realization, please get the hell out of my house.
I have a theory–Billy Graham hasn’t reviewed it, not yet at least–and it posits the house centipede didn’t have an official place on Noah’s ark. It was right around the time of the deluge, crunch time, and Noah had pared down his list to the Z’s.
“Two zebras, excellent. Two hermaphroditic zooanthids…should I file them under ‘H’? No, wait, erasers don’t exist. How about I write ‘zooanthids, herma– And what in sweet Jesus are you?” shrieked Noah, no longer humble.
Two centipedes wriggled in reply.
“Oh, I’m sorry, but economy’s booked,” Noah fibbed in verse 16. “Although I hear the lido deck’s pretty nice at this time of year.”
Two centipedes wriggled in protest. Lightning struck Noah thrice.
“Ho ho! But wouldn’t you know it, in verse 17 I say, ‘Welcome aboard. Yea shall I carry ye home; ye in my beverage holder safe havens maketh.'”
Let’s say revisionist Old Testament isn’t your thing, well, I’ve got a story that will make your toes crawl and your skin curl. Actually, it’s probably woefully underwhelming, but hey! Another day, another discussion. Know this, however: these bastards are waterproof, which suggests they ended up on the lido deck after all. Prepare yourself for a harrowing tale.