Infestation

If the explosions were made of sugar, this would be totally accurate.

Yeah, I’ll admit it – I’m scared of spiders. And fuck you for thinking that it isn’t very masculine to be scared of something tiny. Chlamydia is way smaller than spiders, but you’re scared of that, aren’t you? At least spiders have fangs and the ability to bite, not to mention the fact that they show up regardless of whether you’ve been having unprotected sex.

The number of bugs in a given living space is my number one concern before moving in. I’m not necessarily a tidy person, but I’ve got a major carrot up my ass about keeping my surroundings clean, and a place so dirty that it can sustain a minor civilization of insects doesn’t fit my definition of clean. Call me selfish, but as a general rule I prefer to share my living space only with people who can pay rent.

To be honest, though, even if a spider had the financial means and cognitive understanding of capitalism to pay me rent, I probably still wouldn’t want to room with it – and if that makes me a racist, so be it. Fuck all spiders, everywhere. They’re terrible drivers and I don’t want them going anywhere near Ground Zero.

I’ve been pretty lucky to have lived in some pretty bug free student housing over the past few years, but my current house out near Amazon Park in Eugene is older and a touch more rural, which increases the chances of insect infestation considerably.

It also doesn’t help that my Roommates are slobs. And hey, nobody’s perfect – we’ve all got our faults. For example, my fault is that I’m really terrible at parallel parking. My Roommates’ fault is that they’re physically incapable of taking a dirty dish and placing it in the dishwasher instead of leaving it in the sink long enough for the A-1 sauce to harden into a paste resilient enough to build a battlestar out of.*

*Due diligence; it’s band camp, so we’re all busy, and two thirds of them have pitched in on cleaning a couple of times. But I wanted to make pasta tonight and the sink was too full to strain it, so I’m calling them out on the Internet. I had to settle for peanut butter for dinner. Again. I mean, it was still delicious, but it’s the principle of the thing.

This behavior, coupled with their tendency to take crumbly, sugary snack foods to their rooms while drunk and then lose them in dark corners, brought about a considerable ant infestation in short time, which is pretty much the sum of all fears for me. All you had to do was look at the hardwood floors in our living room and you’d see dozens of the little scavengers parading this way and that. The baseboards in our hallway were a veritable ant 405, a thick trail of them marching off to snack on what The Roommates had been too drunk to finish.

The problem intensified after a recent party, where every female in attendance managed to spill at least half of her sugar-rich Mike’s Hard Lemonade onto the floor, and one of my friends’ wife somehow left an entire kebab behind our motherfucking television.*

*Don’t ask how she did this. I think the better question is why. Because this sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. You have to want to put a perfectly good piece of food – on a paper plate, mind you – in the dark recesses behind a 62 inch TV.

It was like a horror movie in the morning. Everything you looked at crawled. Opening the pantry for a snack, I saw a line of ants running down the back wall, going in and out of poorly sealed boxes of my Roommates’ cereal and cookies.

Even though my room had been spared the infestation, every time my foot itched or I saw a shadow move on the wall I freaked out, assuming that the bastards had now invaded my one refuge, the place where I sleep.

Enough was enough. I had had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane, if you catch my drift.

We went to the store and I dropped $20 on some of the best chemical warfare money could buy. We already had a tub of indoor-safe insect repellant, which I sprayed around every baseboard in the house in hopes of cutting off the escape routes.

I had The Roommates pull all their food out of the pantry, examine it for signs of infestation, and throw the clean food into a big plastic bag, the contaminated in the garbage (which we promptly emptied into the container outside the house). When we were done, all that remained in the pantry was canned food, which I sprayed down with an (all natural) insect killer to destroy the stragglers before deploying a Berro ant trap to catch anybody who came back looking for seconds.

My Roommates set more traps in their rooms, we Swiffered the floor, wiped down the countertops and beer pong table with vinegar (to throw off the ants’ scent – it’s science), and essentially nuked the Zerg hive swarming the kebab behind our TV with the all natural insect killer. By the end, The Roommates were calling me General MacArthur, although I prefer to be referred to as Sergeant Zim, the ultimate bug killer of all time.

It’s not a Hair Guy update if there isn’t at least one Starship Troopers reference.

Winning was easy – ants have numbers, but they have yet to figure out that the oh-so-delicious smelling food in those traps is actually poison that they’re taking back to the hive. The problem is maintaining control in the postwar period – washing the dishes every night and wiping down countertops, jobs that are not necessarily as glorious as ant battle but every bit as important.

Regardless, I believe this ant insurgency is in its last throes.

Truman Capps doesn’t want to think about how many dead ants are in the walls of our house right now.