Can anyone tell me any value to nature that cockroaches bring to the table?  In any joke that involves the eradication of the human species, the joke always runs to the tune of something like “…and only the (insert random hardy species) and the cockroaches will survive.”  Much like college and pro athletes, they’re just disease-ridden vermin who won’t go away no matter what you do.

I was reminded of this as I opened the garage refrigerator (AKA the Good Beer and Bottled Water Holder) the other evening and swore I got a quick glimpse of a cockroach running at the bottom of the inside.  I removed the bottom lettuce crisper section and searched high and low to no avail.  I wasn’t too worried about it since a) it was our secondary refrigerator with no food in it and b) everything that was in there was in sealed glass and plastic bottles.

Sure enough, three days later I noticed, through the semi-opaque view of the lettuce crisper section, the outline of a brown insect.  I removed the crisper and there was that same little useless fucker but this time around he was on his back slowly moving his legs in a Prelude To Death Dance.  That creepy-legged bastard lived for over 3 days with no visible food that I know of in 40 degree temps.  I’m sure it could have lived a little longer in even colder temps as those damn things are the bane of homeowners everywhere.

It’s not just relegated to the South either.  The largest cockroach I ever saw was in the lobby of my first apartment in Chicago and it scared the living shit out of me.  I was scared to even crush it with the protective layers of my shoe but I did and it felt as though I squished an eggshell.  GROSS.

While I’ve seen large cockroaches down here, the one that scared me the most happened just a few months ago.  Thankfully we have kept the roaches to a minimum with our pest control company’s help but every so often they come out of nowhere.  I was in the basement enjoying 57 inches of high definition television goodness and out of the corner of my eye I saw something begin to fly out of the air vent in the ceiling across the room.  It approached me in a landing pattern and I had thought it was a dragonfly or moth by the size of it.  I ducked to the right and it landed on the couch where I realized I just got divebombed by a roach.  Thankfully one of Megan’s chick magazines, the kind with 200 pages of advertisements before the first article, was within my reach and I squished that cretin with a vengeance until it looked like a chewed-up-and-spit-out Tootsie Roll.  Yeah I over-reacted but I didn’t care.  That little wanker took three days off my life with how much it surprised and scared me and I’m happy I sent it to its maker (probably a sports agent or telemarketing boss).