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.
Still with me? You were warned.
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.
These 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.
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 à la Bloom County: “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
As he walked back down the hall, I called after him, “What are you talking aAAAAAAAAAGH!”
HA HA HA!!! I’m so glad you ended up posting this! I HATE HATE HATE those things, whatever ya call them. So creepy and speedy.
When my brother was in middle school he BEGGED to be allowed to move his bedroom into the basement. My folks finally relented and Andy was happy in the basement….until one of these guys FELL ON HIS FACE while he was SLEEPING. Trauma? Indeed. Trooper that he is, though, he stuck it out in the basement until we moved to a new house a year later.
Interesting fact from my cooking class last week: lobsters are also carnivorous. Their claws are rubberbanded partly to protect you-the-unwary-consumer and partly to keep them from killing and eating each other. Yup.
GROSS GROSS GROSS! OMG. I cannot believe you CAUGHT those things. Yeeccccch. And the image of a horse-sized house centipede is going to be skeeving me out all day. Or possibly for the rest of my life.
(THE HORROR.)
@Emma: Woo, another Bloom County reference. The Giant Purple Spotted Snorklewacker was announcing Binkley’s evening anxiety: cockroaches walking on the ceiling. CLUMSY cockroaches. Binkley’s sarcastic response: “Yeah right, I’m terrified.” Guess who sleeps with his mouth open?
I did actually wake up with a daddy longlegs in my mouth one time at Scout camp. Tasted terrible.
@Lawyerish: somehow the dog-sized one was far more horrifying to me than the horse-sized one. But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.
One of my roommates in Boston was opposed to killing any insects (even these icky things) so she would try to catch them under a cup a la spider-saving so she could slide in a piece of paper and put them outside. Have you ever tried this? Bad idea. I don’t think she was ever able to capture a whole one. They moved so fast she would always accidentally cut off pieces with said cup–always some legs, and often part of the body. Gross? You betcha. Haven’t seen them so far in San Francisco, and I don’t miss them in the least bit.
Hey, I remember those hairy guys! I don’t think I’ve seen one since. We’ve had some ants, and a couple of spiders (ewwwwww!) but none of these.
Oh crap, I prolly jinxed it now, didn’t I.
For the record, I didn’t write that on my ceiling. It was Dawn. And I don’t envy you your centipedes, but I will tell you I am sick to death of these horrifyingly ginormous cockroaches down here. Southerners pretend they are not cockroaches by calling them “palmetto bugs” and “water bugs,” but there is no such thing. Euphemism or no, they are so big they don’t even fit in the largest ever roach motel. It’s like trying to catch a Great Dane with a pizza box. I try to tell myself that they are not living in my house, but I am living in their swamp, but it doesn’t really help.
I feel sis’s pain here – having lived in Atlanta for four years I had enough of centipedes, millipedes, brown recluses, daddy long legs with bodies the diameter of half dollars, scorpions, and ants, and that was only within the walls of my first apartment. Then there are the roaches, or what I called B-52 Stratofortresses. The day one of them flew into my wife’s(then “close friend”)’s apartment, sat next to me, and cracked open a beer, I knew it was time to find a new place to live.
Ewwwww.
Being a big geek, I read the Wiki that you linked.
This is my favorite part:
“Most house centipedes are incapable of penetrating human skin with a bite or a sting.”
MOST?