Stop Bugging Me!

I'm not terribly afraid of bugs. Not phobically afraid. I just don't like them crawling on me, or even thinking about crawling on me.

I was doing quite a bit of traveling last week, on business, and during one of my hotel evenings I caught the re-make of King Kong. One of the grossest scenes and the one that made me turn off the T.V. and try to get some sleep was when several of the ships crew were attacked by pre-historic-sized cockroaches. Eww.

CGI-bugs are bad. But there are enough real bug horror stories out there to, well, make your skin crawl.

Here are three of my favorites. And every one of these is true. I swear.

Man as Bug Water Dispenser: My next door neighbor lived in Florida as a child, with his mother and father. He tells a lot of great and sickening stories about the bugs they can grow down there, with all the humidity and warm temperatures. His best and grossest is a story about his father. His father is a very deep sleeper, the kind of enviable fall-asleep-in-five-minutes-stay-asleep-all-night guy. He never moved around; he frequently would awake in the same position he fell asleep in. And that position was inevitably on his back, with his arms crossed over his chest, corpse style. His wife, on the other hand, would waken at the slightest sound. And it was a slight sound that woke her this particular night. A sound she could not immediately identify. She looked over at her husband and saw that he was (of course) sound asleep on his back. But on his cheek was a large cockroach, and it was lapping saliva from her husband's mouth.

Man as Bug Hotel: Many years ago, my ex-husband used to play Dungeons and Dragons. He and his group of friends were over one evening to play a game. During one of the lulls in the game (and there are many, many lulls in a game of DandD), the guys got into a round of storytelling. One of his buds, Lars, told us how much he hates spider. Not passively, but actively HATES them. How he will go out of his way to kill a spider. And all due to a trauma he experienced at summer camp, many, many years previous. It was his first experience being away, at camp. Although it was summer, it was a chilly night. He was in his bunk, and was sleeping soundly, when something woke him. As he came to consciousness, he became aware that there was something in his mouth. Something alive. It took him a moment to realize that he'd fallen asleep with his mouth open. A spider had crawled inside to escape the cold night and curled up on his tongue. He said his screams woke the entire camp.

Spider as Metaphor for Bad Relationship: For more years than I care to count, I wasted time in an on-again, off-again relationship. The details are unimportant, except to say that I knew in my heart that I shouldn't have been in that relationship, that it was bad from the start. But like a drunk, I just couldn't quit him. In addition to my friends, my subconscious did everything it could to tell me to get out. Its most obvious approach was through a vivid, reoccuring dream. I would dream that I had awaken in the middle of the night. In my dream, there was always enough light coming in through the blinds, from the moon and/or the streetlamps, to illuminate the room. I would look over to the pillow next to me, and there would be a huge, black, hairy spider. Tarantula-style. I would yelp at the sight of it, and that would wake me up. Sometimes there was still the ring of my outburst in the room. But still being in dream-fog, I couldn't tell when the dream had stopped, and I would be convinced that there really was a spider in my bed. I would turn on all the lights and go through the sheets to convince myself otherwise before I could get back into bed. I had that dream until I finally ended that relationship for good. And I've never had it since.



So, tell me, what bugs you?