Problem/Solution/Com- plication

Problem: "Hey," your brother says, "you really need to clean your ears. Looks like you got cheddar in there."

Solution: You buy an ear canal irrigation system. Obviously you're too high-class for Q-tips. The warm water flushes out the wax and suddenly you can understand what people say, and it's not always nice.

Complication: You wake up from a dream about a military march because there's something tickling your ear. Then you remember your brother bragging about inventing the first centipede syringe. At the time, you thought you had misunderstood -- due to the ear wax.
---

The Roaches and Me

Unless you have company over, it is only sporting to kill a cockroach with a rubber band. It has been nine or ten shots since my last direct hit, but I feel that using a rolled up newspaper, gasoline and matches, or a suitcase full of sex toys gives me an unfair advantage.

To arrive at this conclusion, I had to deal with my instinctive fear of the little brownish-black aliens. On Saturdays, around four in the morning, I would stagger into the kitchen for a cold grape Gatorade only to find a living blotch on the floor. I would jump into a murderous hysteria, flinging books and magazines at him to remove his plague-ridden insect consciousness from my home. Then, once killed, I would slide his body-goo under some other garbage and begin to forget him. This is what an upper-middle class upbringing did to me -- until, through repetition, I became somewhat desensitized to the roach's brand of ugly.

And I discovered this:

As a human, I have access to poison gel bait. I can kill a hundred cockroaches at will. But they, as a species, are a nearly invincible opponent, so it becomes unnecessary and impractical to kill every roach I see. Where there is one roach, there are a thousand. Killing is superfluous. Maiming, maybe not. Maybe maiming with a rubber band sends a chemical message to the other nine hundred ninety-nine. A chemical message of my machismo.

After all, it takes skill and luck to maim due to the cockroach's sheer speed. A quick, smart one will give me one good shot with a good thick rubber band, and if I miss, even by an antennae-length, it's under the radiator or under the stove before I can pull the second rubber band back.

They are God's creation, like me.

And so our rubber band dance goes on and on...
---

The Other Mammal

I suspect there is a mammal living in my apartment other than me. I suspect this because while writing at my computer, out of the corner of my eye I saw a fist-sized streak cross the kitchen and disappear beneath the radiator. I do not think that it was a fist-sized roach, although that would be equally horrible. It seemed to come from the hallway, and I sleep in that direction.

I have seen mice in other apartments, but they tend to grow no bigger than a golf-ball, and being nearly blind, they tend to follow the walls. This streak crossed the center of the room. It could have been a small rat, but rats are bold, and why would it run so fast when not presented with any kind of threat? No reason. Unless it was super-intelligent.

I fear that while I am sitting here typing I will feel something furry against my bare foot. Just a little brush at first, like a dust-bunny, and then when I look down...aaah, not a bunny at all! Aaah, those diseased teeth! That hairless tail!

So I have been telling myself that I hallucinated, although hallucinating rodents may be worse than having them. You can't kill a hallucination with a heavy book. I've tried.

I rationalize: if there is something in my apartment, it should be more afraid of me than I of it. After all, I intend to kill it. But what if it intends to kill me? If I were a rat and saw a hairless biped a hundred times my size, I would certainly sprint across the room just as the hateful human lifted the pasta pot from the stove.
---