It's just the beast under your bed

An Idaho family was driven from their home and into bankruptcy by "hundreds and hundreds" of snakes that slithered inside the walls as they slept and left them and their children terrified.

I giggled my ass off when I read this short article, and the whole time I wrote this post. Don't judge me for my gallows humor - I feel bad for them, I really do, but there's something about a story of a family moving into a house that is literally writhing with snakes that makes me laugh insanely like an old man in an asylum that just found a piece of saltwater taffy in his pajama pocket. It's beyond awful, and terribly funny.

It reminded me of when I lived in a room by myself in the barracks on Camp Lejeune many years ago. I got some new neighbors one day, and I suspect that they did a thorough spring cleaning of that room because a few days later I woke up in the middle of the night with cockroaches crawling all over me. They were everywhere; all over the ceiling, the walls, the furniture, and they were even in my computer tower and refrigerator. Each barracks building is like its own little city, so there is no way to effectively get rid of them; they live in whatever room they feel that they get the best rent, so to speak, and will move from one room to another.

I lived in absolute horror for several days. The roaches were eating my mattress, the foam on my computer speakers, and anything else they wanted to feed on. They crawled on my face at night, and didn't even bother to scatter when I came home from work. I estimated their strength to be about a brigade sized element, maybe larger. It didn't matter that I kept the room clean and threw out all the food, they just kept coming. Their ingress point was the bathroom - the head, in Marine/Navy jargon - and one morning while brushing my teeth, watching the little fuckers pour out of the faucet like they were entering a DC nightclub, I grabbed a nearby can of WD-40 and tried to hose one down the drain. I swear I heard that roach scream out loud in torturous pain, his little antennae swishing back and forth, and at that moment it was like I was holding Excalibur. I laid the roaches to waste. At night I would make a slick barrier of sweet, sweet, water displacing formula forty around the doorway to the bathroom so they couldn't get in, and every morning for about four days there would be thirty or more dead roaches where the tile met the carpet -- the WD-40 had killed them on contact. I sprayed a box around my bed, and coated each of the bed's legs, too. Every roach hotel in the room was treated with WD-40 until one morning, there were no dead roaches at my bathroom door. They were gone; packed up their shit and left town.

I feel sorry for whomever or wherever they settled after that. I am certain some filthy Marines several doors down regretted leaving half empty pizza boxes on the floor, sweaty sox on the coffee table, and old Mad Dog 20-20 bottles on the counter. Sleep tiiiiiiiiiight, don't let the bedbugs bite!

Muhhuhahah!! MUHUUHAAAHAHAAAA!!!!!