My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Bed bugs are what drove mid-century designers to go modern. You get bed bugs and you start throwing everything out. You want furniture with easy to clean surfaces. No more nooks and crannies. That antique couch I had with all it’s carved finial rococo flourishes were a breeding ground for vermin and lice. Yes, it was a two hundred year old camel back settee, but it had too much company. Chiggers, bed bugs, lice, scabies, ticks, cockroaches, silverfish, and everything else named on the bottle of Raid, all in a swinging orgy in my furniture. I’ll say it again. I truly believe pestilence is the driving force behind modern aesthetics.

stomping them flat

the twine from a hay bale, the post chewed by a horse

comb from hive i got outta Rusty’s wall.

at the junk mail factory illusions are created. A make believe country kitchen built on the third floor of our factory. Outside the loading docks are covered in graffiti.

The Trojan community center was in Medford Mass, not too far from Tufts University. A small group of Trojans escaped from the Ottoman Empire during World War One with the help of Allied ambulance drivers and found refuge in the mill town, making livelihoods for themselves stitching boot heels together and raising apples.

The center was a sad kind of place, just an old cinder block box, but they scraped up some money and had it painted to look like a Roman government building with grand white columns and even a fake arched door painted over the real square heavy pneumatic one.
The Polish American club was right next door, they hosted a bingo night on Tuesdays. The Trojans preferred to keep to themselves however. For kicks sometimes a Pole would walk next door and knock on the door. Trojans spooked easily. It was a historical thing.

The most townsfolks heard from them was the year they passed around a petition to be included on official city polls as separate race. That didn’t get too far. If you’re ever passing through Medford, you can still see some of their apple trees along the river.

Mr. Sunshine is selling this old ford, circa ’58, for $4,200. That’ll buy you the bucket (a narrow manure loader), three point hitch and PTO, new tires on it and running strong.

the bad news is, I have bed bugs. I don’t know how. I don’t know where. Probably something i brought home from the dump because i couldn’t understand why someone would throw it away.

Bed bugs? An antiquated pestilence. As outdated as the desire to be a novelist. About two hundred people a year say thats what they want to do. And they are from developing nations. Just like bed bugs. People today want to be writers. Like me. i want to be a writer. It’s all about the flexibilty in this new economy.

A writer can write parking tickets, customer’s orders, good directions that don’t get you lost, they can write up, they can write down, they can write rongs, write songs, or a jingle or just a verse. Saying you want to be a novelist is like saying you want to explore Antartica by dog sled. We’ll understand. You’re a romantic. You probably want to be a pirate and a robot too. You like to play dress up. But for most people today, they need to be a writer. Understand?

I wonder if blogs are cutting hard into vanity press bottom lines? It used to be rich/obsessive poets/novelists could pay a few hundred bucks and have their work hard covered and shipped in a carton to their door (because no book store would take it?) Imagine how many ideas were lost because of the price barrier to publishing. A couple hundred bucks back then is a thousand today. But we can set up a blog at the library and post to it at work. Fuck it. Don’t cost a dime.

I can blog about my new infatuation with entomology and not need a pesky editor telling me what to do. Blogs are good. But I feel bad for the vanity presses of the world. Will they survive the shakedown?

This whole thing has me stressed out. Bed bugs, not vanity presses. It means I have to put everything I own in a ziplock baggy. Do you know how hard it is for me to use plastic? Not as hard as throwing things away. I watched my hand make the gesture to toss something in the garbage can, but I pulled it back, made the motion to toss, pulled it back, made the motion to toss – i watched my body refuse to throw something away. I am breaking years of training, a whole life philosophy. Reuse is the key element of sustainable living.

What would you do? I took my roommate’s chocolate bar and ate the whole thing. I had the pleasure of stealing and binging. Then, with endorphins spiked, I took the stretch limo out for a ride. If you know what I mean. Drove one handed, if you know what I mean now. Got carsick. Don’t try to think that one through.

But I was more stressed than that. I went and found the box of college days mementos. Glow in the dark juggling balls. A patch from my jacket. Where are they? Clippings from my first lawn mowing job….condom from my first…nope, oh, here they are. My paraphernalias.

I scraped those tarred chambers and smoked them down to the anodized steel. But I didn’t drink, on account of my complexion doesn’t agree to it. That did the trick. I was ready to sort through everything I owned in the world, and throw as much as possible out, bag and seal a little to save…for 18 months, till the eggs were absolutley dead. Bed bug eggs. Lying dormant and invisible in perhaps the pages of The Sun Also Rises – The Sun Also Causes Cancer! – or are they somewhere in the bowels of this cool old wooden radio I have? Probably in both, so I bag them up and take them to my truck. I only have a few baggies. And they’re small. Bed bugs will blow your mind, like thinking about Vikings attacking Native Americans. Really think about that. But the Vikings were Vampires too.

I have bed bugs. Did the neighbor give them to me? My roommates? Or was it me? For legal reasons, I won’t say. But I have my theories. Irrespective, this isn’t going to be a fun summer.