Buggin' Out, or Perspective

Perhaps I am paying for slamming "Harry Potter;" perhaps the Gods are punishing me for a more pedestrian infraction of the Writer's Rules. I don't know for sure, but it is certain that my home has bedbugs and if my life isn't a living hell, I can feel Hades' flames licking at my backside.

In terms of annoyance, bedbugs are in a whole different league than roaches, ants, termites, fleas or even mosquitoes. They bite, drink your blood, and reproduce like otters. Once they get into your home, it requires drastic measures to rid them.

Like, for instance, the following regimen, which Wife, Baby, and myself must follow for the next month:

1. All clothing cleaned and put in plastic bags. Do not put back in drawers, or risk having a bug lodge in your underwear and then lodge somewhere much more unfortunate.
2. Vacuum every square inch of apartment, including baseboards, floor cracks, ass cracks (see above), shoes, books. Yes, books are a great hiding place for these bugs. Pack your books, put them in storage, and say goodbye to them for 18 months.
3. Treat all luggage and furniture with a chemical solution of 60 rubbing alcohol and 40 percent flesh-eating acid. Bag everything. I mean, everything.
4. Move all furniture at least 12 inches from wall, and wait for exterminators to bomb the place.
5. Once bombed, stay out of apartment for 48 hours. I intend to spend those 48 hours at a brothel.
6. Once you return, vacuum every square inch of apartment, including baseboards, floor cracks, and shoes, every single day for a month.
7. Spray chemical solution in baseboards every four days and pray that none of it makes contact with skin.
8. Repeat exterminator treatment. Pray that all the bedbugs are dead. Pray, pray, pray.

Wife and Baby are moving out of the apartment entirely for three weeks while yours truly serves as human bait — the exterminator wants me living in the apartment to draw out the bedbugs so they'll get to the poison.

Meanwhile, every day is the same: come home from work, eat dinner, then vacuum, spray, and bag until bedtime. Vacuum, spray, bag. We've moved all our books out of our place (sob!) and are cleaning like mad.


See the movie, live the life

The most surefire way to rid yourself of these pests is to throw away all your clothes and bedding (in plastic bags), buy new clothes, and move out for 18 months. You see, bedbugs can live over a year without food.

In short, I am quickly losing my mind, and things are likely to worsen until mid-2015.

And yet, against my nature, I'm trying to be positive. When I start to feel sorry for myself (about every five minutes), I try to count my blessings. I'm not a refugee, I'm not homeless, and I am in good health with a wife and son who I adore. My woes are about bugs and my lack of publishing credits.

And I didn't suffer the same fate as Dan.

Dan and I were co-workers back in the late 1980s. We weren't close friends but were on good terms, and I admired him quite a bit: Dan was extremely talented, outgoing, smart, funny, and a good guy overall. Someone that makes you feel at ease and goes out of his way to talk to you. It was my first job out of college, and Dan made me feel welcome. He was a real mench.

Befitting his talent, two years after I started work Dan got a major promotion with out-of-town company, and moved to the East Coast with his fiancée, a research doctor who was gorgeous and sweet to boot.

Soon, they were married, and a year or so later, Dan's wife was pregnant. In short, Dan had everything I wanted: a beautiful wife, a job I coveted, financial security, and a family on the way. He even had moved out of my cowpoke town, where I felt stuck, to a big city.

You probably have a rough idea of what happened next. A few months after his wife became pregnant, Dan started getting mysterious headaches — it turned out to be brain cancer. While his prognosis appeared good at first following surgery, the cancer spread, and he died a few years later, leaving his wife and child. He fought it to the end.

Dan was 33 years old.

On the other hand, I have to deal with bedbugs, which, the last time I checked, are annoying but not life-threatening.

I'll stop here.

The Coolest Guy Show in the World, or Why Adults Shouldn't Read “Harry Potter”

I had written 800 brilliant, scabrous words on the rise of Harry Potter — and how adults have co-opted the franchise — but I inadvertently erased them for reasons not worth elaborating upon. Such absentminded mistakes on my part are common these days, but that’s another story.

In lieu of my Harry Hate, here’s a sampling of the chronic data stream uploading in my head, which I know readers are just dying to hear about.

•In the “How the Fuck Haven’t I Read Everything This Person Has Written Yet?” Department, I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name Is Red.” While the novel can be slow going, it is also absolutely brilliant. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid Mr. Pamuk until now (though I’m not exactly well-schooled in modern Turkish writers. Mediaeval ones, either). Pamuk is a genius, a word I don’t throw around lightly with writers, and even in translation, it’s obvious why this dude won the Nobel Prize. Read this, not “Harry Potter and the Sphincter of Fire.” (More on Harry later.)

•The Chicago Cubs have decided that playing baseball was more fun than beating the snot out of each other, and have the best record in the majors since manager Lou Pinella’s head exploded in June. This is a bad thing. The Cubs are three games out of first place, and as a result, I am a stupid, love-struck teenager once more, following their every pitch and swing of the bat. They will ultimately break my heart, and yet I still watch them with blind affection. Call me stupid; call me a sports fan.

•Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! I just wanted to say that.

•I am coming down with yet another cold. My throat feels like a morbidly obese union carpenter is using a power sander where my tonsils used to reside.

•Baby won’t abide his crib, despite his parents’ unstilted efforts to get him to do otherwise. We’ll put him down, asleep, and in the time it takes the pee to hit the urinal (as I have been holding it in for about 73 minutes as I hold the little bugger), his cries echo through our home; first, flaccid and weak, then increasing in volume until The End of the World is nigh. My solution for this is just let Baby cry until he loses his voice, permanently. He’ll eventually fall asleep and we won’t ever have to hear his rotten screaming ever again.


Wrigley: scene of the crime

•The number of comments on my blog as ground into a number smaller than functioning brain cells in Dick Cheney’s diseased mind. There is a fair amount of blogrolling (you comment on my blog, I’ll comment on yours) in cyberspace, and as I struggle to keep up with others’ blogs, nobody visits here, unless you count the turds who want to know if a certain violinist is gay and you know who you are and if this is how you spend your time, asking if this man is gay, then you live an impoverished intellectual and spiritual life indeed. Learn how to drink or something.

•I changed the layout, added polls, and some bizzare rating systemf at the bottom of each post, and one can see the overwhelming response. It would probably do me more good if, like, I actually wrote something more than once a fortnight.

•Speaking of viewership, I have a friend who runs a terriffic baseball blog that gets several thousand page views a day. Yes, his blog gets more page views in a month than Bookfraud has in its two-plus-years of existence. He was kind enough to have linked my rant on the Cubs’ impending sale, and, viola! there were suddenly hundreds of hits to Bookfraud. Just about nobody commented, unfortunately, and few visitors have returned, but since they were largely St. Louis Cardinals fans, it makes sense, since Cardinals fans are largely illiterate.

•Don’t send hate mail, Cardinals fans. Just a silly joke there from a pitiful Cubs follower. You suck, that’s all.

• Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! Man, I love saying that.


Kids fare; for adults, fair

•“Dogfights” is the coolest guy show in the world. The show recreates classic air battles using computer animation, interviews some of the pilots involved, and analyzes tactics and strategy. Incredibly cool. If it only didn’t deal with extreme violence, and if it didn’t (essentially) celebrate young men’s deaths, it would be perfect.

•My Take on Harry: Of the 8.3 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” that flew off the shelves last weekend, my empirical observation posits that 4.15 million are being read by adults. I see people over the age of 18 reading it on buses, in parks. I see patients reading it while awaiting surgery and hookers standing around trying to pick up johns. Please, adults, read something else, too. Like Orhan Pamuk, or anything but “Harry Potter and the Boner Factory” or whatever it. It’s a book for children.

•Now let the hate mail flow.