Urban Tales

Beneath this very paragraph I've put an artist's rendering of my roommate. I hate him. Not the artist, the roommate. I mean, it would be one thing if I had invited him, but no. He just showed up one night and brought several of his siblings.

Make that several thousand of his siblings. I don't know where they came from. Some of my neighbors say "apartment 6," but I'm skeptical. The only evidence against the people in apartment 6 is that they're Chinese, and I don't think that's enough to condemn them for cockroach manufacture. I rather suspect that the 6-legged roommates are simply a function of living urban in this sea-level town.

Still, I hate them. They don't pay their share of the rent -- or the groceries, which they ruin daily -- nor do they take out the trash (though they do camp there). They don't clean up after themselves, either; on the contrary, they leave little piles of brown poopy dust behind them everywhere they go. Which I have to clean up. Ick.

They homestead in the strangest places, too. I can understand the garbage-dwellers (they are, after all, Nature's Little TrashMen), and I can fathom the Catbox Encampment, but my coffeepot? I wouldn't think they'd be all that interested in coffee, but there they are, each morning a new little family of of pale, nervous baby cockroaches, trembling and snapping their little fingers and saying "cool, man!"  I imagine them quoting Kafka and sharing their unique Beat poetry as they work their way through yesterday's espresso grounds: "Step on me/Step on me/Swat me flat, man."

I'm hip.

I must confess a certain grudging respect for some of them, like the big black ones who live outside, especially when I find them upturned in daylight. In my more pensive moments, seated on my patio with my journal and a fresh (clean!) cup of coffee, I see in its valiant bug-struggles to right itself a particular dogged courage I envy. I wonder if this is what Kafka saw, too, through his own brand of madness.

But inside, I kill every one of them I see, and scrupulously clean up the residue. I may never rid myself of them (the folks in 6 are worse housekeepers than even me and the walls hold many hiding places between us), but my daily struggles make Mr. Upside-Down outside tip his antennae in my direction as I pass. I'm just sure that's what he's doing...