Remember when I posted about our friends, the spiders? Though I did the humane thing and immediately filled my car with so much raid I could have knocked out a dog (by humane I mean good for me, the human) it appears our ooky brethren are not finished with me.

Only this time, it’s not our friend the spider. It’s our  frenemy the cockroach.

Ah, the cockraoch! Eating our food, living in our bathrooms and fridges, leaving their filthy trails over everything we own like a relative who won’t go home and is impervious to most poisons! Unfortinately, for some reason people now think its ok to like our indestructible foe.

“It’s like you’re Wall-E!” my boyfriend declared, upon watching a roach scurry into a drain.

Remember that adorable scene in Wall-E where we think Wall-E squished his pet roach but then it pops up again unscathed? Imagine that scene now in your kitchen. With an army of the roaches. While you try to make a bagel.

“Hey!” my friend exclaimed as I futilely stomped on the ground. “It’s like that thing from Wall-E!”

While the Wall-E pro-roach propaganda machine may have suckered others in, it didn’t get me. Raid, roach bait, visits from the exterminator–all were utilized. I became the Jigsaw of the Periplaneta americana world, laying trap after trap after trap for them (you know its good writing when you reference “Saw”). And I did research on my own into how you can kill them.

You can’t! The best you can do is spray and hope that the Cockroach Gods are merciful and leave to pester your neighbors. They leave trails like ants, they swarm like bees, and are more impervious to death than a blockbuster action hero.

Oh, and they also used to be GIANT.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though. I know there’s life without roaches because I’ve lived that life, known that dream. I’m talking fumigation with the exterminator now, and I hope those assholes of the Order Blattaria understand that I’m coming for them. And when the day comes that I can put food back in my fridge, when I can eat off countertops, when I can open a drawer without fearing the sight of a scurrying shadow, on that day I will look down upon my foe and they will know:

This is not Wall-E.

Current Mood:  weird

I was going to write about the frailties of life. It was going to be sincere and thoughtful, a foray into the depths of human feeling and mortality.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the cow-stripper sign.

Yesterday, as my family was driving out of Payson, Arizona, we were quietly talking about the aforementioned frailties of life. It had been an emotional weekend, draining us of our natural optimism. Never had the universe seemed as cruel to me before, nor life as so accidental. “How can I take comfort,” I asked to my mother, brother and father as we quietly drove along, “knowing that good, beautiful people grow ill and pass on just because they were unlucky? Where is the justice in that? Where is the meaning? Are our lives are nothing more than–is that a cow?”

We all whipped around in time to pass by the sign for an Adult Cabaret, complete with a plaster cow on top. It was a pretty cow, milky white and sandy brown, perfectly proportioned and perfectly affixed to the sign. Unlike our own place in this random universe, the cow’s ultimate purpose was clear; it was meant to be part of the sign. They were a pair, Cabaret and cow, cow and Cabaret, the model bovine complacently smug, sure of itself.

We were silent for a moment, then demanded my father pull over so we could take a picture.

“No! We have a plane to catch!” he responded.

“Life is too short for us not to have a record of Pamela Heiferson,” I told him.

“I think it’s a Sign!” my brother said.

“It’s clearly a sign. An Adult Cabaret sign. With a cow on it,” Mom observed. “Actually, don’t stop. That place is probably full of very lonely cowboys.”

“Or the fattest strippers in the world,” I countered.

“Why can’t it be run by very lonely cows?” Dad wanted to know.

And then we laughed until we cried, because the world is a random, uncaring, chaotic place, but it is also a place where strip-joints have fake cows hanging off them. Bad things happen, but so do silly things, and funny things, and good things, and neutral things, and cow-related things. Life is absurd…but that absurdity makes the rest worthwhile.

We lingered for a moment, acknowledging the Sign. Then we stepped on the gas, because it was getting dark and we did not want to meet the people who thought “cow” was the natural thing to indicate an Adult Cabaret.

This is for you, Aunt Kathy, who always laughed at the cows, even at life’s darkest.