Monthly Archives: June 2014

I’m sorry it has to be this way, Mr. Cockroach

I walked into the kitchen and I saw a cockroach. It was a big one, which, despite that gut-wrench reaction that made me want to immediately pack up and move, was kind of a relief. I read something in a short story years ago about how if you see a really big bug, it’s probably just a loner lost inside your house, an event more than a trend. It’s when you start seeing little cockroaches on a regular basis, that’s when you know you have a problem, an infestation.

And like I said, that was in a short story, a work of fiction. I write fiction and I make up stuff all the time, little convincing sounding facts, just whatever pops into my head really. And so I don’t know why this provided me any comfort. I’ve never looked it up to confirm or deny its validity. But for whatever reason, whenever I see a big cockroach, I cling to this potentially made-up snippet of fact, that it’s not a big deal, that its presence in my house is an accident.

It doesn’t happen all the time, but they show up with enough regularity that I can never just enter a room without bracing myself for a potential intruder. I’m being mostly paranoid. It’s really no more than one bug every three months or so. But that’s enough. The basement is even worse. Aside from the bugs, one time about a year and a half ago we had a squirrel trapped downstairs. I’d open the basement door and just catch a glimpse of its tail before it disappeared between this hole where the pipes from the washing machine made contact with the wall.

So even though it’s not a super regular occurrence, I’ve still been surprised enough times that I’ll turn on the lights and my body is constantly ready for a possible attack. Because you have to attack, as soon as you see the cockroach, your only option is an immediate kill. If you let even half a second slip by where you hesitate, where you consider a course of action, you’re screwed. It’s going to disappear, you’ll never see it again, but you’ll never forget about it either. It’ll be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, constantly projecting its image in your peripheral vision in the form of phantom blurs and mistaken appartitions. And who’s to say that the shadow you can’t be sure you really saw wasn’t the cockroach? I mean, it’s got to exist somewhere, right?

I saw this cockroach in my kitchen and with lightning fast survival instincts, it vanished underneath the Swiffer sweeper. OK, at least I wouldn’t have to go moving around furniture to flush this thing out. But this put a lot of pressure on my next move. Should I move the Swiffer and go for a targeted strike? Or would it make more sense to slam my foot down on the broad surface of the mop, hopefully knocking it out without giving it a chance to find a more secure hiding spot?

I decided that, in an effort to not destroy my Swiffer, I’d give a little nudge, wait for the cockroach to make a run for it, and then I’d come crashing down with a final stomp. When I tapped the handle, I saw it move a little bit, but the pest must not have seen any available avenues for escape, so it went around to the other corner of the mop.

And it just stood there, most of its body obscured by the hiding spot, but its head and antennae clearly visible. I wanted to be like, “Hey, buddy, I can see you.” Like when I come downstairs and my dog is “hiding” in between the two couches. I’m almost insulted, like did you get in the garbage? Huh? You don’t think I won’t know something’s up?

But these thoughts shot through my brain over the course of maybe a half of a second or so, because remember what I was talking about earlier? Roach. Urgency. Kill. I brought my foot down, hard. As I got a huge wad of paper towels, so I could clean this thing up without having to feel its body against my fingertips, a part of me wished it didn’t have to be this way. Why the need for such strong reactions? My crippling fear, the surge of adrenaline that surely might be put to better use during aspects points in my life. There’s really no choice, I mean, I couldn’t have that thing free in my house. But can’t there be a simpler way? One involving a little less panic and stomping and skin-crawling sensations of existential terror?

I should just find the sprinkler

The other day I was outside in my backyard watering the plants. I have a sprinkler somewhere, but there’s this really stubborn and lazy resistance preventing me from digging it out and setting it up. My day-to-day routine would be a lot easier, which isn’t to say that I’m out there every day. But I’m at least thinking about it, as I waste time surfing the Internet, or rush to get ready so I’m no more than five minutes late to work. There’s always that nagging feeling in the back of my mind, dude, you have to water the plants.

Sometimes I’ll get a pretty good rhythm going, something almost resembling a routine. Maybe a stretch of three or four days will pass when I’m actually doing it somewhat regularly, I’m outside, I’m watering the garden. But then maybe it’ll rain and I’ll get the day off. And then the next day I’ll say to myself, well, it rained a lot yesterday, so I’m sure the ground is still wet. And then the day after that, I can see from my window that the soil is visibly dry, but going outside and doing something about it, man, I haven’t done that in three days now. I’m comfortable, settled in to a new routine of not going outside at all.

But more often than not I’m at least trying to take care of my tomatoes and lettuce, and so every other day or so, every three days, max, I head outside and turn on the hose. It’s an exercise not only in the responsibility of daily chores, but also one of patience and standing still.

Some days it’s easier than others. I’ll get lost in the moment, I’ll enjoy being outside, it won’t really feel like a chore at all. But then a lot of the time I’m antsy. All of that resistance that I was talking about earlier, just because I manage to make it outside doesn’t mean that I’m not still drawn back into the house, I can feel it, my chair, the computer, the Internet, they’re all beckoning me to put down the hose and resume my endless wasting of time.

I was out there and I’d been at the hose for maybe a minute, a minute and a half. Everything about being outside was bothering me. I’d been neglecting the lawn for a while now. Everything was starting to get really overgrown and wild. It was the first really, really hot day of the year, and so I was having a very minor freak-out about the passage of time, how I swear it was just winter, like I close my eyes and I can see myself shivering in the cold, closing my eyes in my mind and saying to myself, what the hell, I thought it was just summer. And I feel momentarily overwhelmed, like my whole life is just this blur, I’m trapped on carousel that’s going just a little too fast and I can never really get a good focus on the outside world for more than a second or two.

But even this micro-panic, at least it was occupying my mind. While I stood there and contemplated how in no time at all my life would be over, the hose was going, a minute turned into two minutes, at least something was getting done. But just as I was starting to settle into a standing-still routine, I was jerked abruptly back into the present.

What happened? It was my right leg. All of the sudden it was on fire. I looked down and, I must have accidentally parked my foot directly on top of an anthill, because below the ankle, it was covered in tiny ants. I freaked out, started swatting and scratching at my leg. I turned the hose on myself, and then at the anthill. I wasn’t thinking at all, it was just a pure reaction.

And then I started stomping around, because as I tried to shake all of the little insects from my foot, I realized that there were too many, that for every one that I squished against my skin, there were another two or three crawling out from the many crevasses inside my sneaker, in between the spaces of the fabric that made up my socks.

I retreated back inside and I could feel the itching for the rest of the day. Even when I went to bed later that night, they were there, little phantom ants desperately trying to grab my attention, doing anything in their power to get me to take just one more step. I briefly felt a little guilty for blasting their entire habitat with my hose, but I can’t get down on myself for that. That’s human instinct, that’s how we evolved to be the dominant species on this planet, by lashing out and immediately destroying anything that poses even an imaginary threat to our piece of mind, or lack thereof.

I really should go out there and clean everything up. The hose is still lying there, the plants could use another drink. But I can just see it now, me, I won’t be able to stay still, certainly not long enough to use the hose to saturate the ground. I’ll be too busy hopping around, swatting at thousands of potentially real insect bites. I should just look for that sprinkler. I know it’s around here somewhere.

My friends and I went to Atlantic City

My friends and I all went to Atlantic City a few weeks ago, and after dinner, we were hanging out at this one hotel, at night, they turn the whole pool area into this giant outdoor club. So it was pretty cool, it was early, but not too early, just early enough that there was still enough room to walk around, get a drink without having to elbow anybody out of the way.

Anyway, I planned this whole prank out way in advance. I told my buddy Steve, I said, “OK, so we’re going to throw Kenny in the pool. Cool?” And Steve’s always down for a dumb prank like that, always. In fact, I was doing everybody a favor by actually putting some thought into this. Because if things progressed naturally, Steve would have inevitably had one too many drinks, and he would have just gone for it, I’m telling you, somebody would have been thrown in that pool.

Which, don’t get me wrong, it’s a great joke, a classic. But you have to think about cell phones. Which sucks, because before cell phones, if there was a pool, it was just assumed that someone was getting knocked in. But everybody has an eight hundred dollar computer in their pocket now, it’s not cool. So I took Steve to the side and I said, “Great, so I want you to wait until Kenny is kind of close to the edge of the pool, and then I want you to kneel behind him and try to take his cell phone out of his pocket.”

“Well what if he catches me going for it?”

“Look, I’m going to distract him. I’m going to ask him to hold my drink or something, or I’ll be handing him a drink. So he won’t notice. And even if he does notice, he won’t have any hands to do anything about it. And if he makes a move, just yank it out, all right? Because that’s when I’m going to push him.”

And Steve loved it, he was like, “Ha! That’s awesome!”

But Steve didn’t know that this was only one layer to my plan. Because my real goal was to get Steve in that pool. Remember what I said before? About Steve always doing something stupid like that? Yeah, well I wanted to give him a taste of his own medicine. And so did Kenny. And Phil. Phil got pushed in last summer. It was a mess, he had his phone in his pocket. As soon as he got out, there was a big fight over who was buying him a new phone. And this is totally crazy, but Steve, that lucky bastard, he went on some sort of a gambling tear that night. Nobody knows exactly how he did it, but he made back the money, the eight hundred, enough to buy him a new phone.

But there was definitely a lot of bad blood, especially from Phil, so he was in on this too. His job was to, right after dinner, switch Steve’s phone with this old broken iPhone I had lying around the house. That way, when Steve wound up going in the pool, he’d pull this phone out, he wouldn’t know it wasn’t the phone from his pocket, and we could watch and laugh as he freaked out, we’d say stuff like, “Don’t worry about it man, just do what you did last year, go win yourself a new phone, you’ll be good.”

So it was all set up, Steve was kneeling behind Kenny, right by the edge of the pool, and that’s when Phil came out of nowhere and kicked Steve in, hard. Only, Steve had his hand in Kenny’s pocket, and, I don’t even know how he managed to hold on, but he did, and he pulled Kenny in with him.

“Shit,” I said to Phil, because that wasn’t part of the plan. “You switched the phones though, right?”

“Fuck no,” said Phil. He wasn’t smiling. “Seriously, let him win his own phone back this year. I fucking hate Steve.”

Yeah, this definitely wasn’t going according to plan. Then two security guards came out of nowhere.

“All right guys, everybody out.”

And that sucked too, because they didn’t kick us out last year. And now here we were, everybody stuck outside the club, none of the cabs would take us back to the hotel because Kenny and Steve were soaking wet.

Kenny pulled me aside and said, “Dude, give me Steve’s good phone. Let him take the broken one.”

“Man, Phil never made the switch.”

“What switch?” That was Steve, he heard everything because Kenny was talking way too loud.

More words were exchanged. Phil and Steve almost got into a fistfight. We got back to the hotel and Steve went straight to the casino to try and win back another phone. Phil was completely belligerent and disappeared, like we didn’t see him for the rest of the weekend. Meanwhile, Kenny just kind of stood there looking at me, “So what, I’m out of a phone?”

And yeah, I felt bad. This wasn’t at all how it was supposed to go down. But couldn’t we just win the money back? I mean, Steve did it last year, it’s not impossible, right?

“How much money do have on you?” I asked Kenny.

“I don’t know, like, two? Two fifty?”

“Perfect, me too. All right, so we’ll just double it, right away, five hundred on red at a roulette table. Come on that’s enough right? And with my old broken phone, that’s got to be, what, I don’t know, fifty bucks? What’s that web site that buys broken phones?”

“You think it’s worth fifty bucks?”

“Yeah, there’s a huge secondary market for parts overseas …”

I’ll fast-forward a little bit. We got the cash. We put it on red. And it landed on one of the two greens. So they didn’t take all of the money, but they took half. I told Kenny, “Do it again, there’s no way that happens twice.”

And no, it didn’t happen again, it landed on black this time.

“Black,” the roulette lady said.

“Shit.”

“Sir, please refrain from cursing on the floor,” That was the pit boss.

I was like, “Are you guys kidding me? Why’d you all get so strict this year?”

And that was it. I told Kenny I’d give him some money, but I don’t have eight hundred bucks, and so I guess I’ll just give him like fifty bucks every week for a while, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s fair that I have to pay for the whole eight hundred, I mean, he was in on it too, and so was Phil. But nobody’s heard from Phil. Nobody’s really heard from anybody. That was like three weeks ago and nobody’s really talked at all, not except Kenny and me, and that’s strictly business, nothing but cell phone stuff. Man, I’m thinking the whole trip was a bust, I don’t know, I don’t really see how any of us moves forward from here. So that sucks, and even if we do wind up hanging out again, I definitely doubt anybody’s going to be down for AC again next year.

I’m doing great

My life is going great. So great, you have no idea. Seriously, however great you think your life is going right now, it’s nowhere near as great as mine is. And I’m not trying to brag. I just want to be grateful, to the universe, for how great my life is. Dear universe, thank you for making my life so awesome. For real, I look around at everyone else and I’m like, sure, I have no idea what’s going on in anyone’s life, but just from a superficial snap-judgment point of view, it looks like I’m doing exponentially much better than everyone I see.

One of my coworkers had his bike stolen last week. But not me. Nobody stole my bike. And that guy had these two really strong locks. He always used to give me lectures like, “Rob, you’ve got to get two locks.” He’d tell me stuff like, “No lock is one hundred percent effective. They’re only deterrents. You should get two.” And I would get so pissed, this guy hardly rides his bike at all, don’t tell me what to do, I hate being told what to do. I remember maybe like two or three weeks ago, he was giving me the rundown on why, “You just have to buy a Kryptonite lock. There’s really no alternative.”

And I just smiled politely, I think, I hope I wasn’t telegraphing how pissed off I was, because in my head I was screaming out loud, man, I hope this guy’s bike gets stolen. And it did. I can’t believe it happened. I said to him, “Man, I can’t believe your bike got stolen. Because don’t you always use two locks?” And he tried to play it off all cool, even attempting to own it, kind of, he was like, “You see? This just goes to show that no bike lock is effective!” But I just cut him off, I told him, “Yeah, I actually read this article on the Internet about how unreliable those Kryptonite locks are.”

I made that up, but whatever, it ended the conversation. Not that I needed to end it. My bike is fine. It’s great. I should have just basked in how awesome it was that I still had my bike while my smug know-it-all coworker, not only does he have to buy a new one, but he has to shell out money for even more locks. And they’re not cheap.

Nope, nothing going wrong over here on my end. Things couldn’t be better. I mean, maybe they could, I guess things could always be better. But I can’t imagine how they’d go about being any better than they are. I went to Subway with one of my other coworkers last week. I never get the fountain soda, but for whatever reason I did, they handed me the cup. On the side there was this peel-off promotion, something about winning a chance to star in a Subway commercial with Eli Manning.

And no, unfortunately I didn’t win the commercial. Although, that would have been really cool. I think I just figured out how I could have possibly made my life a little better. But it was OK, because the peel-off said, “Your next lunch is on us! One free foot-long combo!” And I was like, “Yes!” I brought it up to the cashier and asked him, “Hey man, can I just get my money back for this meal that already bought?” and he was like, “No, that actually wasn’t a meal, it was just a sandwich and a soda.”

“So what am I missing for a meal?” and he told me, “Either chips or cookies.” So we got into a little, in my view, I should have at least been offered the opportunity to add chips or cookies to make it a meal. And he was all like, “It’s only good for your next purchase.” But eventually the people behind me started making all of these noises, like they were audibly impatient with how slow this guy was taking to not accommodate my winning ticket. Finally he was like, “OK, sure, here’s your money back.”

And I was like, “Yes!” And I got the free cookies too. But my coworker? Not only did he not win anything, but there was this big piece of plastic in his sandwich. I was like, “Gross! Dude, you’ve got to get a new sandwich. And ask for your money back. And see if you can get some free cookies out of it.” But he was like, “Eh … well … I don’t know,” just totally too afraid of “making a scene,” whatever that means. He said it was cool, he just pushed the plastic to the side, but I could tell lunch was ruined.

For him anyway, but not for me. My lunch was awesome. And I kept telling him, “Man, this free lunch is the best!” because why not? I’ve got to maintain this positive attitude. I go like three, four years without ever winning anything, and all of the sudden it’s this, in the same week, my bike is fine and I get a free lunch. It’s just awesome. Go ahead and tell me that I don’t have to announce it, but you’re just jealous. And that’s not great. I’m great. I’m doing great, man, just terrific.

When I say World, you say Cup. World. World.

That’s right, it’s the World Cup. Has it been four years already? It feels like just yesterday that I was saying to myself, “Wow, is it 2010 already? It feels like just yesterday that …” you get the point. I never think about soccer at all until it’s the World Cup. So when I think of my life in relation to soccer, it’s always about how fast time goes by, in these really quick four-year lurches.

And then when it’s actually the World Cup, time does a complete one-eighty and comes to a halt. It’s like somehow those four years that flew by in between World Cups get compressed into thirty days where the clock barely moves at all. I find myself constantly asking myself, “Seriously? Is it still the World Cup?”

There’s always a moment for like half a second where I tell myself that this year I’m going to get into it, that for thirty days at least, I’m going to start paying attention to soccer. But the other day I went to the gym and one of the games was playing on all of the TVs. So that was a little discouraging, that I’d already neglected to find out when the games were on or who was playing.

And whatever, all of the machines were facing in that direction, so I tried to follow the gameplay as I worked out. But after like ten or fifteen minutes, I really had trouble maintaining focus. The ball was going up and then to the side and then back again. For a while I looked at this guy to my left, he was watching the TV with an intense focus that let me know that he was serious. And I’d look to him, every once in a while switching from the screen and back to his expression.

At one point he clapped his hands together, muttering something to himself, “Yes!” I could tell he was pumped about something that just happened. But, and I was watching, I had no idea what he got excited about. As far as I could tell, there hadn’t been any significant change in the game’s momentum. The ball looked like it was bouncing back and forth and up the same as it had been the whole game.

It’s stupid to rip on soccer. Obviously the rest of the world likes it. And I can’t get mad at people for only watching soccer during the World Cup. I mean, how else is the sport supposed to gain followers if not during these huge international competitions? It’s just a really easy target, soccer, with its gigantic field, seemingly three hundred players on the “pitch” at the same time, running this way and that, the dramatic embellishment, the ridiculously corrupt governing organization.

I want to like soccer, I really do. But I also really want to keep throwing cheap shots at soccer, because it’s just so easy. Whatever, if the US wins the World Cup this year, I’ll never say anything bad about soccer again. So don’t let me down Landon Donovan.

Wait, what?