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My spirit animal is a daddy long legs

Whenever I see a cockroach in the house, my body automatically goes for the kill. Even if I’m outside, but it’s close enough to my house where I suspect that, given enough time, it’s possible that the little guy might somehow randomly make its way into my domain, that’s enough of a potential threat to warrant extermination. And it’s more than just fear, it’s a physical sensation. I see a cockroach and the insides of my body feel like they’ve all contracted inward, trying to find their own hiding spots to get away from the gross little bug. My skin crawls, my breathing accelerates, I don’t know what’s going on, but just looking at a cockroach has a very real effect on my body and mind.

But today I was looking for something in the basement. I moved a stock of plastic containers and, always on the lookout for a potentially hidden roach infestation, a daddy long legs crawled out from behind a corner. And my heart kind of melted a little. I thought, aw, look at that, a daddy long legs. And I just kind of watched as it went from one side of the room to the other, finding a different pile of junk to hide behind and make his home.

His. Look at that. I was already anthropomorphizing the little guy. If he hadn’t disappeared against that far wall where I keep my skis propped up for the majority of the year, there’s a very real chance that I might have tried to lure him upstairs with me, maybe I’d even give him a name and figure out some way to prevent him from pulling another inevitable vanishing act.

The daddy long legs had probably been living downstairs in my basement comfortably for generations. He probably has a whole family that he’s a part of, a mommy long legs, at least a dozen baby long legs. So why doesn’t it bother me the same way that a cockroach does?

Because daddy long legs should be scarier. I mean, they have giant spider legs. Yeah, even though I know that they’re not technically spiders. And isn’t there that urban legend that a daddy long legs has enough poisonous venom to kill an elephant, but they don’t have the fangs necessary to get that toxin into other animals? I’ve never bothered to look it up, but that story enough is at least somewhat convincing that, even if it’s not true, it should still make me want to at a minimum, keep my distance.

But there’s nothing, no killer instinct, I’m a daddy long legs pacifist. I see a daddy long legs and I can’t even imagine how I’d go about killing one if I were forced to. It doesn’t make any sense in my head. But give me a giant cockroach, like a mouse-sized, giant bug, and I don’t care how messy the clean up is, I’d stomp it out with my bare feet if necessary.

What’s wrong with me as a human being that I assign such very different values to insects? That’s got to be some weird sort of evolutionary hiccup. Cockroaches must have done something to my ancestors back when nobody had yet evolved past anything more complex than a lemur. But now that we’re the dominant species, I’ll be damned if I let those cockroaches think that we’ll ever forget whatever it was that causes us to continually lash out at them as an organism.

As long as I don’t have to deal with earwigs, I’ll be OK. Thankfully I’ve never seen an earwig where I live now, but when I was a little kid, we’d go camping upstate every summer. And by the end of each week, the tiny little holes where the wires slipped through the nylon to prop up our tents would be filled, I’m talking jam-packed with hundreds upon hundreds of earwigs.

They’re just like little cockroaches, only smaller, and they always travel in groups, like ants, like the sand-people of Tattooine. And they’ve got these little chompers toward the front of their bodies that, well, I’ve never let them get close enough to find out if they can bite, but I imagine they can. And in my imagination, it really hurts. Fuck earwigs.

And fuck cicadas. But I’ve already written about the seasonal terror that is cicada season in the Northeast. No need to revisit that horror. Daddy long legs, I don’t know what you did to escape my paralyzing fear of the rest of the insect kingdom, but whatever it is, keep up the great work. It’s actually a pleasure running into you every now and then. If all pests and vermin were as pleasing to the mind as you were, I’d be in great shape, just terrific.

When it rains, it pours

Well, you know what they say, when it rains, it pours. Like I just got pulled over a few weeks ago for speeding. And when I gave the traffic cop my license, he ran in it his computer and came back, “Hey buddy, looks like you have a bunch of outstanding parking tickets.” And I just said to him, “Well, when it rains, it pours.” And he said, “Yep,” and then he impounded my car.

We were on the middle of the highway, and I asked him, “Hey officer, do you think you could give me a ride back into town?” and he said, “Well, I’m really not supposed to, but I guess, yeah, all right, you sure there’s nobody that can come and pick you up?” and I said, “No man, I think I accidentally left my phone in the car. Any way you could call up the tow truck and tell them to come back with my car so I can look for my phone?” And he was like, “No way man, just hop in.”

And he wouldn’t let me sit in the front, which, I guess I can understand, that’s his office, he was doing me a favor, he probably didn’t want to have to share his personal space, having me getting too cozy up front. But still, it felt weird sitting behind that glass partition, like I was some sort of a criminal. And I was just about to say to myself, wow, talk about raining and pouring, but I didn’t have time to coalesce my loose thoughts into a complete sentence, because the police radio started going off, the dispatcher shouting out all of these codes, the cop up front yelled to me, “Hang on!” and he hit it, the sirens, the lights, we made an abrupt U-turn and gunned it.

I could tell something huge was up, because all of these other cop cars started joining us, all of us headed in pursuit toward the same direction. I wanted to ask what was going on, but the cop was pretty busy, he was talking into his car radio, and then into another walkie-talkie on the side, all of it in this indecipherable police language of letters and numbers. I looked down at my watch. I was supposed to be at work right now, and my boss already gave me a huge speech about showing up on time. Would I even be able to explain something like this? I could already hear him cutting me off halfway, telling me all about how he’s not interested in excuses.

When it rains it pours, right? Right, but even though it felt like it was pouring, this wasn’t even a light drizzle yet. Because we pulled up to the factory warehouse type building far away from any part of the city I’ve ever been to, and there were like a ton of cop cars there, all of them sirens on, every officer standing by his or her driver’s side door, waiting to make a move.

I guess it could have been worse. By the time we arrived, most of the action must have already gone down. So I’m glad I didn’t have to be there for anything violent. Still, I did kind of wonder what was taking so long, how much more time I’d have to spend in this backseat. And of course the car door wouldn’t open up from the inside. And finally after like forty or fifty minutes, I started to feel really cooped up in there, like I just wanted to stretch my legs, take a breath of fresh air. I knocked on the window but my cop either couldn’t hear me or he was ignoring me. I kept knocking, and after thirty seconds or so, another cop from another car took out his nightstick and hit it against the window, mouthing me to, “Shut the hell up!”

He had it all wrong, I wasn’t the bad guy here. Sure, I wasn’t completely off the hook, I mean, there was the whole issue of those unpaid parking tickets and my car being in some impound lot somewhere. There was that, yeah. But I wasn’t under arrest. If only I could get that cop’s attention again, maybe I could mouth to him something like, “You’ve got it all wrong.” But when it rains, it pours, you know? So that didn’t work. Now everybody was ignoring me.

Maybe an hour or so later, all of these cops started coming out of the building leading all of these obviously bad guys with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One after the other, there had to have been close to fifty men. Were they gang members? Was this some sort of a meth lab? I had nothing to go on other than how everyone was dressed, wife-beaters and sleeve-tattoos. They weren’t good guys, that much was obvious.

Finally, the door next to me opened up, but before I had a chance to get out and see if I could maybe borrow a cell phone to call a cab to pick me up wherever it is that we were, three of those bad guys got shoved in the back with me. So there we were, four of us, it was really too tight, and then a different cop got into the driver’s seat and started driving.

“Hey!” I tried grabbing this guy’s attention, “I’m not supposed to be in here. Can you let me out? Did you talk to that other cop?” And he just ignored me. But the guys to my right, they looked pissed. One of them just kept glaring at me, like if I had any reservations about these guys being bad guys, that all went out the window when this one guy made eye contact. I was thinking, come on dude, we’re all stuck back here, and you’ve still got to act like a crazy bad guy? Can’t you just give it a rest for like one second?

And then they threw us all in a holding cell, all while I tried to grab anybody’s attention, “Please,” I was begging anybody who passed me in the hallway, “This isn’t right. This is all a huge mistake.” But nobody paid any attention. Not until I got to where they book people. They took everything out of my pockets, my wallet, my cell phone. Fuck. My cell phone was right there the whole time. How did I miss it?

“I’m telling you, I got pulled over, my car got towed, and the officer was giving me a ride back into town. I promise, I had nothing to do with that bust or whatever it was.”

And finally the booking officer at least acknowledged me. He didn’t look at me, but he said to me, “That’s too bad kid. But the judge isn’t back until tomorrow. So you’ve got to hang tight until we can get this all straightened out.”

And it was crazy, this was absolutely nuts. And then when it was my turn to make my phone call, I connected with my boss for like a second, I wanted to tell him to call my wife, to send for help, something. But the line got disconnected right after he said, “Hello?” and I was like, “Hello? Hello?” and I looked to the officer watching the phones and said, “It dropped. The call went dead. I’m not supposed to be here. Can I have another quarter?”

And he just looked at me and said, “Nope.”

And I don’t have to say it again, right? The raining and pouring thing. But it’s true. It’s absolutely true. I can’t think of any other cliché phrase that more accurately describes what was going on.

The Flash is the most boring member of the Justice League

I don’t get The Flash. I mean, I get it, he can run really, really fast. That’s pretty self-explanatory. But I’m just thinking of my own running, I buy a pair of sneakers and five or six months later, those things are all but useless. The soles are, if not completely fallen off, they’re at least severely frayed along the edges. And then the inside cushioning is always usually all but totally worn away, making even the shortest of runs guaranteed to give me a blister or two.

And The Flash, he can run around the world in a heartbeat, right? Well I’m just saying, I don’t get how that flimsy red costume of his is supposed to withstand the wear-and-tear that has to accompany such a physical feat of superhuman strength. Just the friction with the air alone should be enough to melt the fabric off of his skin.

Does The Flash have super strength? I mean, I’ve read a lot of comics, and I’ve never seen him lift anything particularly heavy. So I’ve got to wonder how his body is able to withstand all of that impact. Say The Flash can run a marathon in one second. Right, that’s still a marathon. I run a marathon and I’m totally wiped out, I can’t walk for close to a week. But The Flash runs a million marathons and he’s fine.

And there are so many little things that must constantly be in his way. It’s like when you’re on a long drive upstate. How many times does your car windshield make sudden contact with an insect? They explode right away. What if The Flash took one of those to the eye? Or the back of the throat? And you’ve got to remember that he’s running a lot faster than a car, so impact with even a fly might have potential for a devastating injury. And what if it’s not a bug, what if it’s a little pebble? That happens sometimes.

And breathing. How do you breathe if you’re running faster than a speeding bullet? I know, that’s one of Superman’s slogans, but whatever, it applies to The Flash too. At least Superman has the whole impervious-to-physical-harm powers going on. If he can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t need to. But The Flash is just a really fast dude. That’s got to be tough when the air around you is flying by at supersonic speeds.

I don’t know, I’m never been impressed with The Flash. Aside from all of the technical problems I’ve already mentioned, I just don’t think that his character is very cool. In fact, I think that he might be a little too fast for his own good.

No, I think that they should make The Flash a lot slower. Still very fast, but just fast enough that it makes sense to think of him as a real person. Like maybe he could run as fast as a car, and that’s it. Which, yeah, I can’t really think of any scenarios where anybody would be in need of someone who could run that fast. Maybe he could go to the Olympics. That would be pretty cool.

I don’t know, would you buy a comic book about a guy that could run just a little faster than everyone else? Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t either. But I’m not buying status quo Flash comics either. Maybe if he had a secondary power, like if he could turn into a car, or make other people pee their pants just by pointing at them. No, I still don’t think I’d buy his comics. But maybe he could be like a sidekick to somebody more popular, like Batman, or the Blue Beetle.

Semi-seedless sour grapes

I bought some seedless grapes at the grocery store the other day, and I’m not even kidding you, they were at least fifty percent not seedless. As in, seeds. And whatever, I’m not a farmer, I don’t know what it takes to get seeds out of grapes, but if you’re going to advertise a certain product, fine, I can see maybe one or two seeds slipping past inspection.

But this was ridiculous. And even worse, the grapes that had seeds, there were like three or four seeds in each one. That’s like, at that point, you’re eating more seed than fruit. And I don’t necessarily mind seeds. Sunflower seeds? Fine. Pumpkin seeds? I’m not a huge pumpkin seed fan, but if you’re enjoying pumpkin seeds, that’s cool, do your thing.

But you never see anybody eating just grape seeds. Why? Because you take one accidental bite of a grape seed and the entire inside of your mouth gets really astringent. “It makes everything taste gross!” this was me, I brought the half-eaten bag of grapes back to the grocery store. Which, yeah, it is a little petty, like who goes back to the store to return grapes?

And like I said, maybe if it were only a few grapes, maybe even like ten or fifteen seeded grapes, maybe I could have let it slide. I would have been pissed, sure, but I’d have gotten over it, eventually. But this bag, it was like every other grape, sometimes two in a row, seed after seed.

“What do you want me to do about it?” the grocery store manager said, and I didn’t know, I didn’t think this far ahead. Now that I had this guy’s attention, it became painfully obvious, the grapes, the store, the money in my pocket, I had no idea what I was doing here.

But then I got a crazy thought, I imagined this guy in the back of the store, like a drug dealer cutting his Colombian snow with flour or baking powder, he was carefully measuring a select amount of seeded grapes to sell alongside the premium products. He’d run some numbers on a really old-fashioned calculator and, after figuring out just how much he was squeezing out of us, the unwitting customer, too meek to even challenge his little grape ring, he’d start to laugh, slowly at first, but increasingly more menacing, until somebody from the floor had to check in on him, to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong.

But how to express concern about such a potentially legitimate albeit highly unlikely scam? So I just said to him, “I don’t know man, but these grapes were terrible.”

“Yeah, well, how long did you keep them in the fridge for?”

And I was like, “I don’t know, five days? A week?”

And he just shook his head, “Nope, sorry, no returns on produce after three days,” and he held out three fingers, just in case I wanted to count along.

“Hey man, I didn’t say anything about a refund, OK, I just …”

And what did I want exactly? Again, a refund would have been nice, but after denying me one before I even had a chance to suggest restitution, now it wouldn’t make sense to argue for my money back. And yeah, I did eat like half the grapes.

“Well, can you at least get rid of these for me?” and I handed him the bag, pretending to then storm out of the grocery store. But really, I was watching him from the outside. I wanted to see if what I thought was going to happen would actually happen, that he’d take my rejected seeded seedless week-old grapes and mix them in with the fresh produce. Then I’d storm in and go, “Ah-HAH!”

But he didn’t. He just threw them in the trash and then started yelling at some box boy for stacking the boxes on the shelves the wrong way.

When I was a little kid, my family had a pet owl

When I was a little kid we used to have this pet owl. I’m pretty sure it’s super illegal to keep owls as pets, but that never crossed my mind when I was younger, he was just kind of there in the background of my childhood, Oggie the owl. I’m not even sure that’s how you spell Oggie. I’ve never had to write it down before. My dad brought him in the house after having found him lying wounded by the side of the road. My little brother at the time was barely old enough to talk, and he kind of toddled into the living room where my dad was wrapping up the bird’s injured leg in white gauze and mumbled something unintelligible in his two-year-old baby voice. Something he said must have sounded like Oggie, because everyone laughed and it just kind of stuck.

Every memory that I have regarding Oggie is really fuzzy, probably because we were all so young, and so whenever my brothers and sisters and I talk about our family mascot, there’s really very little in the way of verifying any of the sounds and images we all have kicking around in our memories. And another part of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that we can never talk about any of this stuff when my parents are around. They absolutely forbid even a passing reference to the bird. I’m pretty sure somewhere along the line, someone got word of the owl, that someone gave my dad a pretty serious warning, about how they’re protected animals, how you can’t just go caging them up inside.

It was a pretty big cage. At first Oggie didn’t need a cage, because he was injured, his leg was really messed up. And so my dad just put him in this cardboard box lined with newspaper and Styrofoam packing peanuts. It was fine, he wouldn’t move much. But once he started regaining even a little bit of his mobility, it became clear that we needed some boundaries. I remember one time my little sister, she wasn’t even walking yet, she crawled over to Oggie’s box with that cute I-want-to-play-with-my-pet-bird look on her face, and Oggie surprised all of us by hopping out of the box, fast, he was like face to face with my sister, and he let out this insanely loud screech. Worse, I mean, his feet were still heavily bandaged , so there wasn’t any real danger, but he started pawing at my sister’s face. Imagine if those talons were exposed, that would have definitely been a trip to the emergency room, at least.

My dad confined Oggie to a corner of the living room. He bought some chicken wire at Home Depot and affixed it floor-to-ceiling right next to where we had the TV. He cut out a portion of the wire and that kind of served as a rinky-dink door, so we could clean out his cage, tend to his wounds, and give him some food.

I remember that being a problem, figuring out what he’d eat. My parents did a little research and discovered that owls in the wild were predators, that they eat things like live mice. But my mom, who already wasn’t really too crazy about the whole owl-in-the-house thing, I remember her putting her foot down at one point, telling my dad, “There is no way we are keeping a box of live mice in the house to feed that goddamn owl!”

So there was a lot of trial and error. It would have been nice if he’d taken to any of the various bird foods that my parents bought at the pet store. But after a full two days of being surrounded by several bowls of different types of seeds and pellets, Oggie still hadn’t even considered eating anything we offered, and he started freaking out, hopping from spot to spot, gnawing at various parts of the chicken wire, and eventually, that shriek. It got to a point where all he did was stand there and let loose with that piercing cry.

My mom was worried that the neighbors were going to call the cops, so in a desperate attempt to shut Oggie up, she cut up some raw chicken from the fridge into these bite-sized strips and laid them out on a plate and pushed it through the slot in that fence. It worked, and it was weird, the whole owl-chicken thing. I remember asking my mom, “Mom do you think Oggie gets sad that he has to eat other birds?” and she told me something like, “No, that’s how they do it in the wild,” which seemed like a good enough answer at the time, even if I couldn’t make sense of why they’d waited so long to give him chicken, trying out all of those bird seeds that, still kind of just lying there scattered around all of those bowls toward the back of his cage, steadily attracting lines of tiny ants.

From my little kid perspective, I remember it like he was always there in the corner, not responding to our calls, swiveling his head from side to side, occasionally staring at one of us intently and almost menacingly for hours upon end. But really he could have only been there for a few months, tops. Eventually the house started smelling terrible, my mom wouldn’t let us have anybody over the house, telling us not to talk about Oggie with anybody at school, not like anybody believed us.

But we all got the sense that it was coming to end, the way my mom started cursing under her breath whenever she’d cut up Oggie’s chicken, or the late-night fights my parents had behind their closed bedroom door. One day we came home from school and Oggie was gone, along with any trace that we’d ever had a pet owl.

“We donated Oggie to a zoo,” was all that my mom offered as an explanation as to his disappearance, changing the topic abruptly with, “But good news, now you can have all of your friends over later this week!” Which wasn’t good news at all, because even though my parents told me not to mention Oggie around my friends, it was practically all I could talk about. Every time we had arts-and-crafts, I’d draw pictures of him, I’d mimic his screech out in the playground, I was owl obsessed.

And I could just see it in my head, all of my friends coming over, the first thing they’d say is, “See, I told you he didn’t have a pet owl,” which they all did. And my mom kind of laughed it off, like, “Pet owl? Ha!” all while giving me that look, like, you told them about the owl? What did I tell you about talking to your friends about the owl? You just wait until everybody leaves.