{"id":99,"date":"2007-11-14T21:41:33","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T02:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crankopotamus.com\/blog\/?p=99"},"modified":"2017-04-27T09:14:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T13:14:40","slug":"you-try-to-scream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/you-try-to-scream\/","title":{"rendered":"You try to scream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lawyerish<\/a> always inspires me. This week, it’s house centipedes.<\/p>\n

This post is not for the faint of heart. Continue reading at your own risk.<\/p>\n

Still with me? You were warned.<\/p>\n

My college apartment had many wonderful features. We had solar-assisted hot water; there was a full carpentry shop in the basement; and it couldn’t have been any closer to school. On the negative side, we did have to put up with paper walls, elephants living upstairs, and the occasional house centipede.<\/p>\n

These<\/a> are some extremely disturbing bugs. They’re shaped like a centipede, but they have long, thin legs like a spider. Destroying them was always a struggle. I knew instinctively that they had to be flattened, but I didn’t want to touch them, or go near them, or do anything but shriek and run away. I think we had a couple hunks of two-by-four lying around, so we could squash them from a distance. But they were unnaturally fast. You had to be quick to get ’em, or they’d disappear under the baseboard.<\/p>\n

My friend Maureen and I liked to try to creep each other out. During one such session, I observed that the weird bugs seemed to be getting bigger. I asked her what she would do if she saw one the size of a dog, rooting through the fridge \u00e0 la Bloom County: <\/em>“Dijon mustard? I hate dijon mustard!” She admitted that she would probably scream so hard that it would be inaudible. Then she suggested that if you could get one the size of a horse, it might make a good mode of transportation; they move so fast, after all. She suggested a man in a business suit, holding his hat on his head with one hand, carrying a briefcase in the other, speeding along the highway on the back of one of these horrors. I added the image of a bumper sticker saying BEEP BEEP I’M A BUG, which is probably slightly less funny to those of you who don’t know that my sister, for some reason, wrote the words BEEP BEEP I’M A JEEP on her bedroom ceiling in chalk when she was in high school.<\/p>\n

The trouble was, we didn’t know what these bugs were called. After the conversation with Maureen, they became Dog Bugs, but we still wanted to know what they were, which we recognized as a necessary first step to (please, God) getting rid of them once and for all.<\/p>\n

Dan suggested that we capture one. The college must, after all, have a Department of Creepycrawlythingology. We could put it in a jar and ask them to identify it.<\/p>\n

Capture one we did, but we somehow never got around to taking it over to the school. It sat in an otherwise empty jar on the counter in the kitchen and slowly suffocated or starved to death. I don’t usually torture animals, but I wasn’t going to open the jar for any reason.<\/p>\n

Once it was dead, well, it wasn’t long before Dan captured another one. He put it in the same jar and we continued to not bring it over to school.<\/p>\n

I was in my bedroom reading, late one evening, when Jorma came home. I heard him hang up his coat in the kitchen, and walk down the hall. He stuck his head into my bedroom, and calmly said, “It’s eating the dead one.”<\/p>\n

As he walked back down the hall, I called after him, “What are you talking aAAAAAAAAAGH!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawyerish always inspires me. This week, it’s house centipedes. This post is not for the faint of heart. Continue reading at your own risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whiskey-tango-foxtrot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crankopotamus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}