Pests

One summer I lived with my mother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For a period of that summer, she left town, left me alone in her apartment. I was nineteen years old. I neglected to take the trash out for several days, because the trash can sat in a pantry and didn't noticeably smell, and I wasn't amassing enough garbage to need to take it out. There was food in there. The next time I threw something away, I found that maggots had infested the plastic waste bag. They looked like moving grains of rice. I was disgusted, and then deeply ashamed. The shame burned my face as I took out the trash, hosed out the bin, sprayed Lysol, put the bin back in the pantry. I never told her.

*

That same summer, I worked at a rundown movie theater. I started out in concessions, and then I was trained up to tickets and eventually projection. (Which I loved. Projecting movies was one of the most remarkable collisions of cerebral passion and tactile pleasure I've ever known. I didn't get to splice very often, but sometimes I did. I stole a metal reel that was broken and unusable, and I hung it on my wall, over the TV, for years.) But when I was still downstairs, I learned that the concessions booth was inhabited by mice. We never saw teethmarks on any food containers, and we never found droppings. But at the end of the night, cleaning up, we invariably saw small gray blurs darting from corner to corner. They were unmistakable, even if not fully visible. The leadership of the theater chose not to act on the mice. They didn't do any harm, didn't interfere with the stock. We thought they probably ate the popcorn we dropped and that was it. Plus, it was a rundown theater, one of the least busy in town. I imagine it has since closed.

*

In high school, my bedroom was in the basement of a ranch house in Maryland. The finished part of the basement was separated, by thin walls and thin doors, from an unfinished portion. Boxes occupied it. So did crickets. Dozens or possibly hundreds of shiny black crickets, noisy and quick. Sometimes they made their way into the finished part, a.k.a. my bedroom, and I'd find them, antennae twitching, on the beige carpet, or on the linoleum glued to the cold concrete of the bathroom. Trembling, sneaking up, yelping when they moved, I would trap them under water glasses and leave them there to suffocate. It would take a couple of days. At first I tried to shift them onto pieces of paper or cardboard and release them outside, but they'd just return to the basement, and on more than one occasion, a cricket leapt inside the glass, scaring me, and I dropped it. The unpredictable movement of the crickets was more frightening than I can communicate. They terrified me, to the point where I lost sleep worrying about them. To this day I am afraid of crickets. Not spiders, not beetles, but crickets.

*

Sometime in August of 2016, I found a baby cockroach in my kitchen sink. It was the first of several. I am a poor housekeeper, but not that poor; it was part of a general downward trend in the quality of that kitchen, and generally, the living experience in that apartment. I was less disgusted than I was disappointed: this place, too, was subject to pests. I tried to keep it safe, but I should have known that was impossible. I contacted the management company and they came and sprayed, but the roach incidents increased, coming closer together in time, the roaches bigger and bolder, and about a month later we moved out. It was the last kick out the door we needed from that complex, which was awful, but which gave me a whole lot of writing material. Including this.

*

Part of the reason I hate the holidays - the seven weeks from mid-November to the beginning of January - is the energy in the air whenever I'm outside my home. The general public is emotionally raw, whether they're nervous or angry or joyful or something else. Everyone is excited in some way, like a molecule is excited: quivering under the influence of an energetic force. Their emotions are large and exposed. It's extreme. I hate it.

At the end of last week and the beginning of this week, as you may know, major fires erupted in my area. By the grace of the Santa Anas, we never had to evacuate, but we had a couple of scary days; one of the fires was only a mile or two away. On the third day, the winds died down and our air quality declined, so we went to Lowe's to see if we could get some filtration masks and potentially a purifier, if we could find one of reasonable price and functionality. Within a few minutes of going in the store, I felt mean and angry. I snapped at Matt and got so impatient that I walked away from him when he wanted my help. I was tired and unsettled and just mad. And as soon as we got back in the car, I felt better (and regretful).

It was the people, I realized. The stress of the fires caused people to buzz with such bad energy that it turned me into Mr. Hyde.

We went home. We went out again a couple of days later and the very same thing happened. I felt rude and short-tempered and mad at the whole damn world. "I'm not going out again," I told Matt after we got back in the car. "Not until this is over." He nodded fervently.

I can't hide from the world forever. And I can't perceive human beings as pests. These two sentences are almost perfectly opposed and both true.

I tell people fairly often that part of what I love about working at home is that when I do go out again, the world seems nice. I greet people happily instead of seeing them as obstacles. Slow clerks are worth my sympathy. Bad drivers are cute. The more I'm out and around people, the more they seem like they're in my way, instead of going their own way.

One year, I hope, I'll be monied and isolated enough to stay home for the entire seven-week period of the holidays. At that point, the only thing I'll have to worry about is crickets.

Out in the world:

For sinkhole, I reviewed Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land, which was rereleased in a ten-year anniversary edition by Graywolf. In the process of reviewing this book, I wrote about whiteness in America at perhaps unwelcome length. I hope you read it anyway.

I reviewed a fascinating book, Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism by Omise’eke Tinsley, for the Houston Chronicle. Almost everything I have to say about the book is in the review; almost everything I have to say about placing the review is unsayable. The Chron was great to me. Very sharp, very nice people there.

For Western Humanities Review, which is working to beef up their critical section, I reviewed The Making Sense of Things by George Choundas. This was one of a really small number of books by straight white men I've read or reviewed this year, and so far it's the only one that didn't make me roll my eyes at least once because patriarchy. I'm glad I broke my rule for it, and I give it my highest recommendation.

For Books I Hate, I interviewed Matt Lubchansky. I've been a fan of theirs for a long long time and I was really happy to add them to the roster. They're totally right about The Canon.