roaches
I was just going to put this in the comments, but I probably shouldn't clutter them up, so it's going to get a post here instead.
The original post is about cockroaches, and, more importantly, killing them. I firmly believe that the only things to survive a massive nuclear war will be twinkies and cockroaches. My dad says they can live for a month off the sweat in your underwear drawer, which isn't a particularly appetising description, but it is an accurate one.
I can't describe how disgusted I am by cockroaches. I'm a firm believer that there is "Dirt bugs" and there's "Earth bugs". If you get a few earth bugs every once in a while, it happens. They're god's creatures, and all that. But dirt bugs survive on all the gross stuff humanity produces (garbage, poop, Michael Moore), and have an appearance and habits according to their natures.
I think the most disgusting thing on the planet has to be the hissing cockroaches, which I have fortunately only seen at the zoo. If there's anything more repulsive than a giant bug that screams at you as you step on it, I don't want to know what it is.
I used to live in an apartment that was known by me and my 15 roommates, affectionaly and accurately, as "The crackhouse". We had what you might call a cockroach problem. The fact that there was bunny shit all over the floor didn't help (different story), but generally, we kept up after ourselves and the bunny.
Dishes didn't sit in the sink for more than, oh, two or three weeks. We used borax, which the roaches laughed at and ate for dessert. Everything edible went into the fridge, which we figured was mostly safe. That included dry flour and our cigarettes. Fortunately, we didn't eat at home much, because literally everything that could be possible food for the fuckers had to fit into our fridge, along with the beer.
This is nasty: one of their primary entry points into our apartment was through a hole behind a broken tile at the far end of the bathtub. This meant that, every once in a while, you'd be taking a shower, the water backing up a few inches in the bottom of the tub, and all of a sudden a giant cockroach appears out of nowhere and does a slide down your bathtub like he's at a fucking waterpark and is swimming around in the water, trying to grab onto something not porcelain, like, say, your feet.
Needless to say, I usually jumped out of the shower at that point. I actually showered with a girl in there once, but somehow the constant checking to see if we had a six legged friend grabbing at our feet somehow spoiled the romance.
As I said, they laughed at boric acid, which we had a very attractive two inch line of along the entire edge of the apartment. They understood traps as nothing more than "Traps", and avoided them as such.
But see, we could've kept our apartment so clean that Martha Stewart would have been proud to eat fondue from our toilet. It didn't matter. Our downstairs neighbors were, to put it gently, at the low end of the white trash scale. It was a guy and a girl, the girl worked at a local adult book store, I don't know what the guy did except kick the crap out of the girl so often that the cops knew all the neighbors by name, they had seen us so many times.
They had a cat, and, if you were standing on the landing outside of their apartment, the smell of the litterbox was so overpowering some people actually vomited from it. I don't think they ever cleaned the fucking thing. I don't even want to know what the rest of their apartment looked like.
So, we'd find a temp home for the rabbit and bug-bomb every room in the house about once a month, and the roaches would take a nice little vacation in the shithole downstairs. A few days later, we'd have roaches swimming in our shower again.
On the average, I'd kill one per night. I tried to train the rabbit to hunt them. He was free-range around the apartment and didn't do much of anything useful, and he was bigger than them, so I figured he ought to earn his keep. Either that, or we could build a little chariot for him and the roaches could pull him around in it, which I thought would make for a neat trick.
No shit, I used to have nightmares in which the roaches crawled into my bed at night. Hundreds of them, crawling all over my body, biting my skin, all through the blankets, pointy legs in my eyes, streaming into my mouth, getting crushed by my teeth and seeping cockroach-goop onto my tongue, crawling live into my ears, nose and throat. Scurrying over every inch of my skin, climbing around inside my head, lungs and stomach.
I think, at one point, there was a King Cockroach, a man-sized bug. He didn't talk much, he just sat in the corner, where the roof had caved in, glaring at me ominously and directing his millions of subjugates to do whatever would gross me out the most. Of course, they didn't care about their own safety, there were millions more; I could kill them as long as I liked, and there would still be more, crawling across the floor from the darkness, up the bedposts, and onto my skin.
The solution? I moved. Then I got deployed, and eventually wound up in an apartment complex that would be appalled by the sighting of a cockroach, because the owners are big enough that a resident could write a letter to the local paper and do them serious harm. God bless the American suburbs; half the people that live around here only know of cockroaches from news stories, like coyotes or gangbangers. Something that only happens to someone else, and usually someone not as high on the social scale.
