Wednesday, February 18, 2009

The bedbugs are coming

Reports that a bedbug infestation is taking over Manhattan read like ad copy for a horror movie. In my life as a 'rent, I've ingested and administered the pinworm pill and shampooed my hair and my children's in louse pesticides. I've laundered every towel and item of clothing in scalding water daily for weeks. I've bagged and sealed all personal items and put them in deep storage (they may still be there, for all I remember, since the shampoo causes brain damage). In my 30-odd years as a New Yorker, I've scraped cockroach feces off my walls and stumbled over rats in the street. After much scientific research, I've pinned down the identity of the mysterious "hairy bug": it's a house centipede. I've endured a fly hatch in a radiator cupboard that sent 100 giant shit eaters buzzing into my apartment in a single afternoon. I am a vermin-tested veteran. But I cannot face the bedbug wars. 

3 comments:

Barbara said...

For many years, I wondered what those hairy looking insects that primarily inhabited my basement were (centipedes? millipedes?). Now I realize—they were house centipedes! Thankfully, disgusting-looking though they were, they were easily dispatched.

You might relate to my blog entries, My Life in Bugs, Parts One and Two (http://famosity.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-life-in-bugs-early-years.html; http://famosity.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-life-in-bugs-part-two-older-but-not.html).

Robin Amos Kahn said...

Last year we had two attacks of the bedbugs and it was horrible, annoying and a big pain in the ass!
But I survived.

Mia said...

What! You had two attacks of bedbugs in a year and you never whined once? You are truly made of finer stuff than I. I'm all don't-sit-too-close-to-me on the subway already, and I've never even seen a bedbug. You probably would be really good at surviving cancer too.