May 19, 2003

I spent the weekend enjoying mindless slaughter and deploying vicious chemical weapons.

Am I Uday?

No.

I am a homeowner. And I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

Well, ant- and wasp-worlds. Oh, and I mercilessly thrashed dandelions and poison-ivy vines, as well.

Due to the presence of Bob the Cat and and a kitchen light that I left on for four years straight, my Queens apartment was essentially vermin free. Odd for the city, particularly for a building as old and a kitchen as ill-maintained as mine. But true, nevertheless. And it's not as though the pests weren't in the building: after the folks across the hall moved out, I snuck into the empty apartment to have a look. The bathroom floor moved when I turned on the light, so I high-tailed it out of there and laid an impenetrable barrier down across my threshold using Black Knight, the most devastating roach spray known to humanity (made in Kansas, chock full o' phenothrin, ask for it by name). And I remained secure and largely bug free.

I don't live in the city anymore, and the ecosystem of my home has become much more complex. The basement is the realm of freaky ur-spiders--brown recluses. They don't look like proper spiders at all; their legs are too long and their bodies improperly small and pinched-looking. They spew ill-formed grotty webs everywhere and this time of year many of them clutch small fuzzy white balls that are either the result of or the precursors to their toe-curling mating process, whatever that may be. I don't want to know. But they and their hideous offspring will be dealt with by my five-horsepower shop-vac. The basement is also home to soft millipedes--liquidated individually by pinpoint assassination; they're tricky, stealthy buggers--and the occasional errant wasp, which we'll get to more of in a moment.

The perimeter of the house is now under assault from ground-based sappers--carpenter ants--and aerial soldiers--wasps of various descriptions. The ants' sole purpose is to eat my goddamn house. Actually, it's the termites who want to eat the place; the ants just want to chew it up and spit it out so they can live in its beams and flooring. But we've got the termites licked. Fifteen subterranean bait stations full of yummy virgin pine, a veritable termite buffet, await those bastards. As soon as they snack the bait will be swapped for a high-tech low-toxicity poison that will prevent the colony members from molting. Presumably they will then explode. The system cost a lot of money, and I eagerly await the first evidence of termite feasting, so that we can demolish their cities, ravage their queens and make their grubs orphans before they pop and die.

But back to the ants: the previous owners, being drunken and overly fond of motorcycles, thought it would be a good idea to let the ants chew up a significant portion of the front porch, and then burrow into the bedroom floorboards. No more. Now the tiny savage monsters will get tasty splotches of strategically-placed honeydew spiked with fipronil, which they will carry back to their queen and share amongst themselves. Then they will keel over and twitch and die while I laugh and dance upon their broken bodies. Ants don't always forage for sweet stuff, though: their dietary requirements vary depending on the time of year. So I also have tasty protein granules. These, too, will be brought back to the colony, a prelude to more laughing and dancing. Those who think they can escape by travelling to the roof decking via the maple and the pine trees will also face miserable chitin-shattering death spasms, for I have a ladder. I will go where they go. I will think as they think. I will do as they do. Their tiny agonies will be as music to my ears. I will laugh on high, but will climb back down the ladder to dance in a safely victorious manner.

Peapod's eaves are open, and the lack of soffitting is an invitation to various airborne nasties who want to hang paper nurseries under the edges of the roof. For these wasps, I have overwhleming, high-pressure poison with which I gleefully saturate them from twenty-five feet away. They shall not prevail! This weekend a full dozen fell before my chemical wrath. Grim faced wasp-officers drove in black sedans to paper houses in the countryside, bearing the tragic news to patriotic wasp-mothers and wasp-fathers. Their progeny had made the ultimate sacrifice.

But I am merciless. I am highly motivated and well-equipped. Unwanted itch-making vines are mutilated by the Porter-Cable 10-amp Tiger saw as it tears through their thick and woody roots. Their oily leaves wither in the sun, and I revel in their slow, dehydrated anguish. For good measure I spray their ruined corpses with bottle-deployed defoliant from Bayer-Purcell Laboratories, the same non-staining, red-tinted death I bring to sinister dandelions...they may look bright and cheery, but they'll kill you soon as look at you. I triumph over their mangled, curling, dying stems.

They won't win. Any uprising will be put down without remorse. I will choke the lawn with their dead, though it makes my fingertips numb and blinds my cat.

For I am a homeowner. My house is a house of death unto the crawling, flying, stinging and inappropriately blooming things of the earth, and my house shall prevail.