Waterbugs: Why???

Like Jar-Jar Binks, you don’t know why it exists.

Like the Energizer Bunny, you see it run by and wish it would just keep going.

Like the Starship Enterprise, it goes places no one has ever gone before (did you ever notice how grammatically incorrect that misplaced preposition is?)

I speak of the waterbug: that insidious, nigh-uncatchable, cockroach-on-steroids-like creature that skitters across bathrooms and kitchens at speeds well beyond the capabilities of impulse power (that’s sub-lightspeed to you non-Trekkie Star Wars fans).  I’m minding my own business, you see, just cooking away on my not-that-great-anyway apartment stovetop.  I’m chopping the veggies ‘n dumping them calmly into the pot.  I have the knife poised to start in on the chicken tenderloins when movement to my left catches my attention.

The knife flies across the kitchen (all 4 remaining feet of it) as I screech and jump backward.  Running up and down, down and up my kitchen wall is the 2-inch-long Jar-Jar of the insect kingdom.  I grab my trusty bottle of Great Value Windex-of-the-Wal-Mart-kingdom window cleaner and commence to squirting the hell out of the interloping vermin.  It darts beneath the oven and commences to stay there. 

Fast forward a couple of nights.  I’ve worked out, I’m all showered ‘n smelling happily of Green Clover and Aloe, I’ve turned on all my tabletop fountains and scented wax fragrance distributors (that’s “candles” to you lay people).  I’m relaxed on the bed watching movies on my laptop when I realize that nature is calling so loudly she must be using 7.2 channel surround sound.  To the bathroom I go, pausing to flip on the light switch…and there’s Jar-Jar carousing atop my bathroom sink…and the rapidly-dwindling window cleaner supply is just beneath where the wicked fiend is skipping around blithely.  I’m glued to the floor.  If I move, it will attack and eat me.  Must wait it out.

Approximately 5 minutes later I’m still rigidly statue-like when the Gungan of Satan FINALLY slips out of sight.  I charge toward the cabinet door, yank it open, and grab my liquid weapon just in time to see Jar-Jar attempting to hide from my attack.  Too LATE, you freakish joy-stealer, I have you now!  And I begin firing.  Whatever is in the Windex-esque stuff must paralyze them or some such torture because I drowned the thing while it clung without ceasing to a cabinet edge…  It was DEAD and still clinging for lack-of-life to the sort-of wood.  So I got the vacuum cleaner (‘cuz there’s no way I’m getting that close to touching it) and sucked the motionless carcass into that blessed PETA-approved machine.  Victory was mine, window cleaner my liberator.  No waterbug dare encroacheth upon my sacred domicile lest it suffer the blue wrath of my liquid revenge!

So 3 nights later I groggily wake up to pee.  Light switch is flipped onward.  TWO waterbugs are frolicking across my bathroom countertop.

You can kill it, but it just keeps coming!

THIS JUST IN (or it was as of last night): The bugs have been MURDERED!!  Yep, like a ring wraith straight out of Mordor I winged my way home armed with a big blue can of Raid that's supposed to keep on killing up to 6 months and wreaked my wraith/wrath!  They thought they could keep hiding underneath the sink.  They thought I was afraid to open the cabinet doors (they were half right).  But I did!  Because I'm the hunter and destroyer of germ-carrying insect life!  After spraying down their darkened habitat, I watched--can o' poison poised to be sprayed--as they fled the scene then let loose a pool o' death all over them. 

It was a beautiful thing.  Now I'm just hoping they didn't have babies...