etherfarm

One of dem Volvo Nosferatus

Later

14:58 on Tuesday, March 19, 2002 • 6 responses

Earlier

A few days ago, Poog, who almost always goes to bed before I do, called me into the bedroom and said, “Look at this,” pointing to something she had on her book.

Crawling around the book was a huge tick.  “It was crawling around on me, under the covers,” she said.  She killed it.  It crunched.

Last night, I put on a sweater and settled in for a long night of reading. About three pages in, I look at my left wrist and crawling out from underneath my sleeve was a huge tick. The internal dialogue that unfolded in my head immediately afterwards probably went something like this:

This dialogue was then externalized into numerous flailings of the arms, probably some kind of small, grossed-out, guttural yell, a fingernail flicking of the tick onto the floor, piling several hardcover books on top of the tick, and moving them about the floor with much my weight on them, hoping to smash the bug that had just emerged from my sleeve. PETA can kiss my ass—these things carry lyme disease.

I gathered myself, gathered the books one by one, and when I picked up the last book, there was the tick, fully intact. Several seconds later it started moving away from me. If it could talk, it probably would have said something like, “Damn, G, you’re no fun.”

I ran and got a plastic CD case and with its edge, smashed the tick into the floor.  It crunched.  It crunched louder than Corn Nuts crunch. The tick’s head, rolling away from its body, sounded like a ball bearing or a marble.  It didn’t sound like an insect.  Ticks aren’t insects.  They’re super-engineered indestructible miniature blood sucking robots.