I know: You probably think crickets are cute. Let me tell you, forget the cute association with top hats and spats — they’re a goddamn menace. I say that because there’s one in our living room that I’m looking to kill. No matter where I go or what I do on this level of the house, he is all I can hear, and all I can think about.

My eldest asked, “Dad, why does he bother you so much?”

And I thought about that. I did. And now I have a definitive answer, at least for this very moment:

Because right now I’m trying to work on my play and a scene set in a furniture warehouse and all I can think about is that goddamn cricket I have to listen to.

My wife and I have each separately torn apart the entire living room looking for this cricket, to no avail. This cricket is such a noisome nuisance that our dog won’t even lie down in that room. I have tried closing this door. I have tried going down into the family room. Like the beating of the telltale heart, I now hear him everywhere.

Tomorrow I’m going to Do-It Center to buy cricket poison. I’m looking for something irrefusably tasty to crickets that will lure him out of his crevice and leave him smack on my floor deader than Karl Rove’s permanent Republican majority. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to buy a gecko and set it loose unfed in the living room until it catches and eats its own dinner.

In the meantime, I’m taking my laptop (and a glass of wine and a cigar) outside to the back yard to write. Are there crickets out there? Sure. But I can write with them out there — that’s where they belong.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.