Okeefereport: Cockroaches and Haywire Nerves

I’d rather live independently but if I have to live with cockroaches I would prefer that they were the healthy self aware ones who disappear with the light or any other sign of human intrusion into their pastoral play. As it stands I have no roaches living or breeding within my flat as it has been fumigated, one could say inoculated, requiring only booster shots from time to time. Other flats and neighbours may or may not have been inoculated but the evidence shows that these pests, like whopping cough and polio remain. Sick roaches escaping from downstairs or next door arrive seeking reprieve or at the least something to slake their thirst and find only more of the same. Weakened and confused they turn belly up on my bathroom floor but not before making a nuisance of themselves nesting in the towel or shower curtain from which they drop to share the shower recess during what should be a contemplative morning shower not a hunt for feral insects. Others , or the same who knows, deprived of their native cautiousness like footballers after a boozy season launch will crawl over a foot or up a leg when all the attached body wishes is for a successful bowel or bladder evacuation without returning to complete consciousness at this early hour of the day.

Other distractions to a restful contemplative life have come in the form of what I shall call ‘haywire nerves’. I wake in the middle of the night with a burning itch in the heel which even after considerable scratching shows no outward sign of irritation. Recently I experienced the sensation of a moth crawling through a path, roughly translated as a right hand part, in my hair for a couple of days. Now as I’ve said before I don’t relate these woes in an effort to arouse sympathy, though any sympathy aroused will be warmly received, but rather to add them to a bank of knowledge which may sometime be useful to you. Imagine a day when you to feel a fictional moth crawl through your hair and you can say to yourself ‘I feel as if a moth were crawling through my hair – just as Uncle Robert did’. What a comfort that will be unless of course Uncle Robert turns out to have an incurable brain aneurism and is committed with foaming mouth to an asylum for the very short remainder of his life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that life is dangerous and the afterlife is uncertain. Even less certain is the quality and cost of the wine in an uncertain afterlife and or the cost of living in general. What about housing affordability, wage restraint, banked hours? Will superannuation carry over? What if the afterlife turned out to be even more perilous than this one.

I know your enjoying this line of thought and I’d like to continue but unfortunately I need now to go sit on the throne where I shall take and read my favourite part of the papers, the obituaries. So far I have not come across anyone who died of chronic diarrhoea, a bright note to close on what.

R

MY FAVORITE THINGS

Rear vision spiders make webs on windows,