is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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On How I Am a Slaughtering Machine, and Dumb.
On How I Am a Slaughtering Machine, and Dumb.
For the last day or so I have been angry about insects. Their very existence is irksome to me. They are everywhere. Inside the house. Everywhere I look, a spider. Everytime I turn around, a crunchy bug. Out of the corner of my eye, a fly, and then three more. Inside the house.
Normally I don't kill the insects that live with me. Not that I'm a Buddhist about it or anything. It just seems reasonable that I can live alongside a certain number of insects. As long as they aren't in my bed or in the part of the shower/bathtub area that gets taken up by me and some water, we're cool. But the reign these creatures are trying to have over me in this farmhouse is ridiculous. So for the last twenty-four hours or so I've become an insect slaughtering machine.
For instance, I highly recommend the Michael-Graves-designed fly swatter you can get at Target. Not only is it cute, with its holes in the shapes of stylized flies, but it smashes the shit out of some flying bugs. I killed about eight of them in three minutes when I got home from the store.
No special equipment is needed for the crunchy bugs, because they for some reason never even try to escape. I just grab a Kleenex and CRUNCH.
And the spiders? GOOD BYE. There were approximately eight living around the kitchen table, now gone. Five more in the bathroom, gone. Six in the bedroom, gone. There are more, but perhaps they can stay, as long as they don't get all uppity on me.
That may be a vain hope, because these spiders I live with are INDUSTRIOUS. Every time I brush one of their webs aside when I'm cleaning, they build it back up in a matter of hours. One day I was shaving in the shower, and I removed the cap to the shaving cream and set it on the ledge of the window that looks in on the bathtub. When I came back to the house about five hours later, the cap had been thoroughly incorporated into a web that had not existed before I left. Also, some art I hung up LAST NIGHT has been bewebbed.
I was complaining about this briefly to Mr. Perrone when he asked me how my unpacking was coming (I was in New York! Where they have phones that work! And I got to talk to Mr. Perrone on the telephone!), and he was agreeing that the crunchy bug thing was gross, and sharing my dislike of the flying bugs, when I was heard to exclaim, "I mean, THEY ARE ON ME WHILE I AM SLEEPING! THERE WAS A CRUNCHY BUG ON MY PILLOW!" At this point Mr. Perrone went straight to the point, as he tends to do.
HIM: Why don't you get a mosquito net?
[pause]
ME: That is a good idea. Why am I so dumb?
HIM: [silence] [Is he wondering why I am so dumb? Or is he thinking, 'you are so not dumb I am not even going to dignify that question with a response!' Or is he painting his new cabinet while waiting for me say something worth responding to? You be the judge.]
ME: Well. That is what I am going to do. I am going to buy the shit out of a mosquito net.
Then we talked about more interesting things. And that reminds me that I should stop writing about bugs RIGHT NOW.
But since I'm being boring today, I'll add some more random facts. In downtown Amherst, a quarter buys 50 MINUTES worth of parking. In San Francisco, 15.
And: I've decided not to get cable for the television. I just can't pay for TV. IT IS WRONG THAT I SHOULD BE EXPECTED TO PAY FOR SUCH A THING, given how much freaking advertising TV sends my way constantly. So this means I get only five stations, and only two of them come in without that snowy effect. PBS works pretty well, so I can watch the Jim Lehrer News Hour. ABC comes in pretty well. And I can watch NBC through the snow, which means that I got to see Dave Eggers on Conan O'Brien the other night. That was funny, and surreal. There he was, sitting with Denise Richards and Matthew Broderick, the other guests. He talked up the writing labs he's set up for kids in San Francisco and Brooklyn, and the Future Dictionary of America put out by McSweeney's. He did a good job of being funny and normal but also interesting and smart, and I was proud of him.
6:35 p.m. - September 13, 2004
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