I have a great doo-wop song about roaches at home. I'll have to upload it later as accompaniment. To anyone who's spent time in an urban enviornment, they are your constant companions, like it or not.

Exterminator's assistant flashbacks! Nooooooooooooo!

But I like your poem, Pips.

I have sometimes thought of them as New York's Boldest.

Doo-wop about roaches... excellent. Poetry and music go so well together. : )

Course, my original inspiration was the Bridgeport of my youth, not NYC (a little "poetic" license, if you will -- Time present and time past, and all).

(NYC roaches are much larger)

[and on preview, thanks HJ]

I've experienced the little bloodsuckers in both cities, but NYC ones are a breed apart. It's Green Beret level combat dealing with those fuckers.

Do you remember the ER where the woman had one in her ear?

Eeeks. The stuff of nightmares...

We chased them with cans
of Aqua Net;

This reminds me of one night many years ago when my brother and I were home alone. We thought we heard someone prowling around downstairs. We were both more scared than we were willing to admit, but we whispered some plans, armed ourselves with whatever spray cans we could find -- hair products, mostly -- and headed downstairs to flush him out.

Last night I was reading the AskMe thread about roaches in the laptop, which was linked to the thread about roaches in the microwave. Just then, a roach flew from behind my head to the other end of the room, turned around, and flew right back at me. Sucker hid before I could get a shoe or magazine. I did not use the laptop or my pillow to whack it, though I was tempted in the heat of the moment.

When I was living in a walk-up near Columbia, there was this roach that got stuck trying to get out from between the ceiling and the painted-over-in-the-1920s trim. I was almost inclined to leave it there as it struggled but it made such a racket I couldn't go to sleep, and I was sanguine about the mere existence of roaches, but this one ... I didn't wanna turn off the light.

I used up a full can of hairspray a girl had left behind trying to kill it -- it just seemed to struggle more chaotically. I went down to the lobby and slept in a chair there.