NEEDLING

I was standing at my sink making preparations for coffee, such as cleaning the pot to boil water in, getting the beans out of the freezer, plugging the grinder into the wall, et cetera, when I noticed something bizarre, something which didn’t seem quite right. To the right of the sink, I’ve got a few dirty glasses – working in a liquor store, I get more free glasses than I know what to do with... I can go several days without cleaning any glasses and be fine – so to the right of the sink, there was around half a dozen glasses of various sizes. One large sixteen ounce pints was moving! This is not normal. I grabbed the glass and looked inside. Ten, plus or minus a couple, very large cockroaches were struggling against one another trying to climb up the glass walls of their prison. But how did they get in, and why? Kind of like a lobster trap. You get them to crawl into a contraption of sorts out of which they cannot get back out. This could be a revolutionary concept for such places as Austin, Texas, where Cadillac size cockroaches are the norm. This glass must have been used by yours truly for one of my concoctions such as half orange or pineapple juice, half Perrier. Or maybe it was those pina-coladas I was trying to make the other night, which I gave up on finally because they were so candy sweet, and I don’t like that at all, the reason I often put sparkling water in my juices, otherwise I find them too sweet. Anyway, some sticky sweet residue must have been left at the bottom of the glass, enough to attract a whole slew of cockroaches. I walked to the back fence of my backyard and threw them there out the back alley. And Stay OUT! The sight, though, of ten or so large cockroaches stuck inside a pint glass looking up at me all bundled up together with their multitude of legs, antennas, carapace brown and grey bodies, insect eyes looking up at me, at once begging for mercy and telling me, if we were but half your size, we’d eat you alive.