My friends, I don’t know how many posts I’ve written about my roach phobia and how I need to do something about it. You OG readers are probably tired of reading about it. But I was reminded of it again during our recent heatwave when I came home several hours after nightfall and it was a refreshing 108 degrees outside. I pulled onto the driveway, turned off the ignition, and was about to get out of the car when I saw something moving quickly and erratically on the front patio. I sat still in a vise-grip of fear-induced paralysis as my brain interpreted what my eyes were seeing. There’s only one thing that can scare me enough to freeze me like that, anyhow.

My eyes had fastened onto a huge roach that was covering my front patio helter-skelter at 500 miles per hour, running, flitting, zig-zagging its way from one end to the other, partway up the side of the house, then down, partway up the steel screen door, back down again, and around and around. There was no way I could get out of my car, much less walk onto that patio and open my door. I was stuck.

I called my friend who shares my roach phobia, and she graciously stayed on the phone with me for 34 minutes. The roach eventually slowed down and stumbled over the edge of the patio immediately to the right of the front door, and there I could see frantic yet static motion. I realized that the roach had crossed the invisible line of Creepy Crawley’s magic potion (laid down around the perimeter of the patio the day before), and so it was in the process of dying. The behavior I was watching was the roach’s physical response to the substance. When I say it’s nontoxic, I literally mean that there’s no poison involved. It’s an agent that instantly dehydrates the insect, sucking the moisture out of it. Death occurs fairly quickly. In the case of a large roach, it occurs after about 30 minutes.

Let me tell you, the turbo-charged panic and then death throes of a huge roach made for quite the spectacle to have to watch, and I had to watch it, because I had to keep track of where it was. I was going to have to get out of my car and go into the house eventually. I had to know the location of my enemy.

At any rate, I won’t bother recounting my eventual entry to my house. You can imagine that I was half-dead before I made it in.

Thus again I feel the need to overcome my phobia, though all the overcoming in the world could never convince me that it’s a good idea to attempt side-stepping a monster roach running amok on the front patio.

Meanwhile, in the backyard, Salem’s absence is allowing birds to eat dying roaches. I had the occasion to witness this ghastly extravaganza one morning as I was breakfasting. Birds that were clustered on the back patio drew my attention to a large roach that had also encountered Creepy Crawley’s solution. It was past the berserk stage and well into the disabled stage, and I couldn’t help but watch as two of the birds took turns pecking at it. The roach got smaller and smaller as bits of it disappeared down the birds’ gullets.

Salem is making sure that I won’t have to see a dead roach on the patio.

And if I ever actually embark on a roach-phobia-curing adventure, you’ll be the first to know about it.

Happy weekend eve, Everyone!