R-R-R-RAAAAID!

I have but one phobia: Roaches.

Snakes, frogs, rats, mice, whatever. They don't phase me. I think they're cute. But show me a roach, and I can sympathize with people who stand on chairs and scream when they see a mouse.

I. Hate. Roaches.

It's less hate, and more "blind terror." I am blindly terrified of roaches. They render me mute and unable to move, while I process that my most hated of all beings, is in my house.

In Florida, roaches aren't so much a possibility, as an inevitability. Little German roaches, big Palmetto Bugs. ::shudder::

I rarely see them in my house, because I'm fastidious. But every now and then, they rear their ugly little heads and crawl out of a drain, or creep under a door...

The other day in the kitchen, one fell out of god-knows-where. I chalked it up to a solitary roach. But today... Today I opened my desk drawer and there was... A ROACH! A small German roach.

And he nestled deep among my "beloved junk." So I did what any sane person would do: I sprayed my beloved junk with Raid. Then, I went outside, and sprayed the perimeter of all my doors with Raid. Then I came back inside to see whether the roach was dead, because I couldn't bear to sleep in the same room as a roach.

It was not. So I took my beloved junk, and brought the drawer to my spare bathroom, where I spent fifteen minutes pulling my junk out of the drawer, and shuffling it around with a Sharpie. I caught glimpses of my foe every minute or two, and then he'd run underneath a pad of Post-Its or a lighter, or one of the many Zippo lighters I get at bars when I'm drunk.

After more Raiding on my beloved junk, I isolated the little beast, and flushed him down the toilet, with much recoiling in horror and much silent screaming.

Now, I have all this crap strewn about the floor of my bathroom. I suppose I should put it all back and deal with it later... Ugh.

But two roaches in a week makes me think I'm going to need to take MUCH more drastic measures. I think it's time to bomb the house. And to load up on more Raid traps... and those egg killer pads.

You might think I'm going overboard. But dying of Raid induced cancer, or having a baby with no eyes and fifteen arms is way more preferable than sharing any living space with roaches.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to breathe into a paper bag. I was just about to engage in my "pre-bedtime" wind-down activity... but... even that's ruined, because it shared the same drawer as that PEST.

Oh my god. So awful.