This motherfucking apartment building.
Just now, as I was walking up to my room on the third floor I saw a good-sized cockroach crawling up the white wall along the stairs. It was about 2 a.m. Prime cockroach prowling time. It stopped crawling as I passed it, moving its long brown antennas pretty strangely. Maybe it was anxious - it should have been. I was carrying my bike up the stairs. The past couple days have been a little boring, and I had been riding around the area for an hour or so to kill time and get some exercise.
These fucking roaches have been hanging around here for a couple months. I do the dishes, take out the trash, vacuum every so often, whatever. It doesn't matter. The whole building is infested with them and they keep strolling into my apartment looking for food or other roaches or something. A couple of them were breeding pretty intensely in my shower the other day, so I beat the hell out of them with an old book I've been using as an exterminator. It's just some old, nasty novel from the 1950s. The title is "Space Satellite: The Story of the Man-Made Moon." This book just happened to be the most disgusting weapon-worthy item in my apartment the first time I saw an insect worth terminating earlier this spring.
Tonight, carrying my bike up the stairs, I decided to take my offensive a step further, do a sort of preemptive strike. So I gripped the center of the bicycle's frame, moved the rear tire a few inches back from the wall (and the roach), and then swung the entire bike like a baseball bat. It took a couple hard swings, but I eventually broke the roach in half. The bug didn't actually fall off the wall - its guts seemed to adhere to the paint pretty well. It just stayed there, bent into a V shape and still twitching those gross antennas. I proceeded to carry my bike the final story and a half up to my floor and walk into my apartment.
It was a pretty satisfying kill, but not at all analogous to my relationship with this building (and its bug problem). I'll leave here soon enough, but this place will probably last for at least a couple more decades. The ancestors of these roaches will almost certainly outlast me, my relatives and any of our spawn. We can't get rid of them. Cockroaches were here before us, and I assume they'll be here close to last.
Basically, I need some roach spray and a fly swatter.
