You know, dear reader, I do my best to extoll the virtues and pleasantries of living in Fecal Creek, CA.  And I know I’ve spilled a lot of virtual and analog ink over the years bemoaning the literary uninhabitable heat that happens here from Cinco de Mayo through Halloween.  But as I’ve recently discussed here, I may finally be getting acclimated to this unreasonable heat.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  You know how old people are always cold, and they always talk about going to warmer climates for their health or bones or whatever?  Maybe that’s going on.  I hope not.  Regardless, I am trying to lean into the heat this year.  Not just to accept it, but to embrace it for some reason I have yet to figure out.  Surviving multiple summers here does suggest a durability, a hardiness, even a ruggedness you possess that other humans and species do not possess.  But there’s a darker side to that arrangement: you’re stuck living here with those hardy, rugged creatures, and the warmer the temperatures get, the more some of these little monsters thrive and breed.  Which is what brings me to the topic of today’s sermon.

Behold, dear readers, the unmitigated chaos that descends upon our beleaguered hamlet of Fecal Creek each summer, a season wherein the very basic fabric of our domestic tranquility is besieged by an army of cockroaches so multitudinous, so audaciously omnipresent, that one might be forgiven for imagining a dystopian epic penned by a madman with a typewriter and a vendetta.  These six-legged marauders, glistening with the unholy sheen of resilience, emerge from the dank crevices of our collective subconscious – or, more likely, the sewer grates – transforming our sunlit days into a grotesque ballet of evasion and existential dread.

Let us consider, with a trembling yet irreverent chuckle, the sheer audacity of their numbers.  By mid-June, as the thermometer breaches the infernal threshold of ninety degrees, the cockroach population swells to a figure so staggering – let’s hazard a wildly speculative estimate of eleventy-billion – that one cannot so much as open a cupboard without encountering a symposium of antennae and skittering legs, debating philosophy or plotting their next assault on the sanctity of my artisanal sourdough stash.  The kitchen counter, once a bastion of culinary ambition, becomes a roach-filled agora, where these critters hold court with the insouciant swagger of uninvited guests at a black-tie gala.

And oh, the indignities they inflict!  Last Tuesday, as I endeavored to brew a pot of coffee – black as my mood and twice as bitter – one such brazen interloper executed a kamikaze dive into the carafe, necessitating a ritualistic exorcism involving scalding water and a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush.  The sheer affrontery!  To infiltrate the sacred rite of caffeine consumption is to declare war on the very soul of Fecal Creek, and yet, these pests persist with a tenacity that borders on the absurdly heroic.

What recourse, then, for the beleaguered citizenry?  Traps abound – sticky, insidious contraptions that promise salvation but deliver only a tableau of wriggling captives, a macabre art installation titled the Agony of the Arthropod.  Pesticides, those chemical knights in shining aerosol cans, offer a fleeting reprieve, only to be met with the roaches’ evolutionary middle finger: resistance so robust it could withstand a nuclear winter.  We are left, dear reader, to wage this battle with brooms, bravado, and a grim determination to reclaim our dominion, one squashed invader at a time.

So here we stand, on the precipice of July, in Fecal Creek’s cockroach apocalypse, armed with humor as our shield and a reckless disregard for the conventional.  Let us laugh in the face of this scuttling tyranny, for to do otherwise would be to cede victory to the six-legged horde.  Until the autumn chill restores order, I bid your fortify your pantries, steel your nerves, and join me in this absurd, ongoing crusade – because if we can’t beat them, we’ll at least mock them with the ferocity of a thousand suns.  Onward, brave souls, to the Roachpocalypse 2025!

N.P.: “Bug Powder Dust” – Bomb The Bass, Justin Warfield