I would never call my apartment spotless; it could use a
good vacuum and dusting, and possibly a mopping. And while my apartment is not
sterile, I would never expect to find an infestation of bugs in my home. Unfortunately,
I do have an infestation of bugs in my home, which I find to be rather
undeserving. While living in Utah, my roommates were utter pigs. Our bathroom
was a biohazard and our kitchen, a composting heap. But never once did we have
an issue with bugs, besides a small bout with fruit flies that had found a four
month old banana hidden atop our cabinets (we found it liquefied a few months
later). But surely, that apartment was deserving of cockroaches, flies, and an
assortment of other crawly things.
So when I did find my
first cockroach, I was rather confused. “Why do I have a cockroach in my sink?
Nothing is in there.” This thought occurred after I ran out of my apartment,
screaming bloody murder. My next thought was that my downstairs, Asian neighbor
must have sent the beastly thing up. How he would have conveyed a message to a
roach to make it upstairs, I don’t know, but I am convinced that he managed to
communicate with them, sending them up my plumbing. To combat the issue, I
trapped the roach under a tea cup and then later boiled a pot of water, pouring
it on the insect, and hopefully boiling any other roach friends that it had
down the drain. I then called my apartment super, who then managed to get a
pest control service out to my apartment, but when he got here, there was not a
roach to be found. I’m sure that he reported back to my apartment super that I
was just the boy who cried cockroach, and that I wouldn’t need any more pest services.
After a while, the roaches started to come back, but this
time in droves. Enough so that when I came home, I would open the door and the
kitchen countertops would quiver for a good five seconds, before all the
roaches could find a dark hiding spot. I would not stand for this, and called
the super with another complaint. This time, I received a note on my door
saying that the pest control service had been by and had not seen a problem, so
it became my war to wage.
Roach motels freak me out, and so I decided to opt for
caustic chemicals instead. I sprinkled borax everywhere I could imagine a roach
would hide during the day, and then poured a cup full down the drain just in
case the mother of all cockroaches was living in my pipes. And this worked for a while. I didn’t mind
living amongst a possible carcinogen, as long as I was pest free. But then the
roaches came back again.
I went to wash my hands in my bathroom when I saw that the
roaches had now taken up root in my sink.
The borax had failed me, and I was
out of options. After I tried smashing the roaches with various hair care
products I had strewn about, I received inspiration from the heavens. I
uncapped my hairspray and cemented the bugs to my counter top. This has become
my solution for any bug intruder that has entered my home. From praying mantis,
to houseflies, I have covered in hairspray and allowed them to slowly freeze
into their AquaNet-ed death pose. I must look insane to my neighbors, lurching
across my living room with hairspray in hand, quickly spraying the walls,
windows, and cabinets, but who cares if they judge me anyway? I’ll probably
wear a hole in the ozone layer and they will develop skin cancer in kharmic
justice.
