Of Cockroaches, and Why They Own You

Written by | Musings

Knock! Knock!

Who’s there?

Cock…(continued at the end)

Every house has cockroaches except that some have infestations and others have small populations. Even when you have done everything your mother, the ultimate exterminator, taught you about getting rid of cockroaches, you still see them around your house. If you don’t, ask yourself where they might be hiding so well that they can run their own things without you even noticing. Its why they call it ‘pest control’ and not ‘pest annihilation’, when you finally find their lair and see how fast they breed and how well they run their shit, disorganized cities though when compared to ants, then you understand why your mother would spend a whole day cleaning the entire house at the sight of just a single cockroach.

Cockroaches must have hidden in the Ark and moved with man from Africa (there evolutionists and creationists, I just put your claims in the same sentence, now hug and make up!) to the rest of the world. That’s why this Wikipedia article will tell you of American, German, Asian, Oriental (am sure if you looked at them through a microscope, they have squinted roach compound eyes), tropical, and then now, supposedly extinct ‘roachoids.’

This one will tell you that cockroaches have survived since the age of the dinosaurs, have evolved to ensure they can live for a month with no food, two weeks without water, hold their breath for 40 minutes and live without a head for a whole week (talk about giving head). Even scarier, they can run up to 3 miles an hour, although am sure Kenyan ones are faster (keep this in mind, it will come in handy later) and most interestingly, mate only once and stay pregnant for life. Think about that, a female cockroach only has sex once, and then just keeps shitting roach eggs its entire life. This means the male roaches have to really work hard to be a lifetime father?

If you thought you had seen the worst of cockroaches then read this, and find out the tricks evolution is playing on us. Did you see that? Flying cockroaches! ‘It’s big — about the size of your thumb — and it has wings, and it’s attracted to light.’ Still, it is thought that cockroaches could originally fly and have only lost this ability to adapt to living on the ground as scavengers. Which means all those cockroaches in your house have tiny vestigial wings and, if you make life too hard for them, will just switch on the evolution button and your infestation will just become scarier and more airborne.

Dramatisation

So, here is my breakdown of the universal species of cockroaches:

The Confident Roach: This is the worst type of roach because it waits until you have guests and then chooses that moment to dash across your living room. It does not bother to hide against the carpet or run along the wall. Instead, it dashes right across the room so everyone can see it. The worst part is not that your guest sees it, but that you actually see it first and then have to watch helplessly as your guests eyes fall on the marathon roach and smile awkwardly. If the said guest is a crush or someone you aspire to date or lay, whichever the case, then the confident roach becomes the confident roaches. At that moment, they become Bolt, Gay and Powell, and their kids, and instead of one cockroach migrating, you have three running across the room. That’s three times the amount of embarrassment because where one would have been excusable, three indicate that you have an infestation and should probably call the exterminator, your mother. 3 miles per hour is the highest recorded speed, but when you have guests they do like half a mile an hour to increase the chance that your guest will see them too.

The Cake Roach: I say cake because it is the one snack with a clear wrapping that you have to store with its wrapping if you intend to eat it later. This roach is just caught doing what it does when you are sleeping, eating your cake. Sometimes, you get the odd feeling that this might be the one you see but they might have been many when you were not looking. It’s like being the last guy in an orgy, and getting caught while at it when everyone else has gotten off and left. It’s even worse if your cake has raisins or some other fruit because the instant you see the roach, you will want it to be a raisin in motion and not a roach. This transcends to most foods, even sugar, and I have spotted a roach in a cake still on the supermarket shelf. It makes you wonder, how many roaches have we eaten without knowing?

The Loo roach: This is the villain of the roaches because its lair is in one place you can’t spend all your time. Do an experiment with this one, to know whether you have an infestation, wake up in the middle of the night, open the door of your washroom slowly, close, and then switch on the light. If you can immediately trace one on the floor, one on the wall, one on the door and one on the toilet seat then congratulations, you have an infestation! To them, you are like the police, distracting meetings and rallies, or mass orgies and they hate you for it.

The School Bag roach: I have only seen this once, many years ago when a school mate became an agent of evolution. The school bag roach is exactly what you think it is, it is the roach you carry to school because it slipped into your lunch or break and no one spotted it. Your wish at this point is that only you sees it and not your classmates because then you will become the guy or girl with a roach. Guys can laugh it off, girls, sadly, will use it against you in a fight and it will hurt. I guess you can also call it the briefcase roach, the one you carry to work and it starts running around and mating with another species and then you have started a new infestations.

The Roaches-You-Do-Not-See: This one’s scare me the most because you know they are there, but you do not see them. You have not found their lair or ever seen them yet when you wake up in the morning and you have this creepy feeling that hidden somewhere in the walls, the crevices, lurking behind the water dispenser or fridge is a family of cockroaches that does not help you pay rent. You know they are there, but you never see them. They moved the coffee, or the plate of food you did not care to clean last night because you were too tired. Hell, they even cleaned the plate for you because their mother, unlike yours, told them that a plate must be cleared of its food for the child to claim he or she is full, and must be washed and dried before you sleep. You are sure you left some morsels of food on the plate, and you left it on the edge of the top part of the faucet, and not inside yet when you wake up in the morning it is inside the faucet and there are no morsels around. It couldn’t be rats, you are sure, and you do not have a cat, so it could not be that either. If you are in this dilemma then it’s the roaches you do not see, the ones currently staring at you from the crevices, laughing their little exoskeletons off at the prank they have played on you. Moving the plate took like a hundred of them working all night but seeing you staring at the plate for ten minutes now, it was all worth it.

The Roach-that-doesn’t-die: You know when they say roaches can survive nuclear fallout? Doesn’t it scare you then that for the most intelligent species on earth, we humans cannot survive a fall out unless we are coated with several kilometers of lead and live in a bunker one hundred miles away? For a species that is supposedly at the height of its evolutionary process, we fair badly when compared to cockroaches. Still, what do they put in the sprays and ointments that is worse than nuclear rays? It makes you wonder whether Mortein Doom is worse than an atomic bomb for it to make a cockroach wriggle, turn upside down and die. Whenever I spray a cockroach and it does that, and I forget to throw it in the bin or flush it down the loo, then I come back later and it’s not there, two things come to mind. One, his family has carried him to bury him by eating his innards out and are now plotting on seeking justice by eating half my cake and then leaving just one of them to disgust me enough to the throw what they have left behind away. Two, that the spray just gave such a nice high that he just fell, turn and lay on his back shaking his insect legs and then blacked out, he cannot, it would seem, ‘hold his beer.’ He has therefore woken up, probably thrown up and left a puddle too tiny for me to see and is now in a cockroach bar giving the crazy story to his cockroach friends that goes something like ‘So today that stupid human who lives in my house…”

… Cock Who?

Cockroach!*runs and hides*

Owaahh ©

Last modified: February 3, 2020

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