the wigs

My townhouse is at ground level and is in an area surrounded by trees and prone to dampness. This means that my patio is usually full of mosquitoes, which makes it less than fun to sit out there in the summer. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of a patio. The dampness on the patio attracts something far more insidious than a few measly mosquitoes, though.

The dampness on the patio attracts EARWIGS.

Sammi and I screamed for like ten minutes straight while I was trying to find an appropriately terrifying earwig picture to link there. We are traumatized, you see.

Earwigs are harmless, or so the internet says. They don’t live or colonize indoors, but they will come inside if a house is poorly sealed. My house is poorly sealed, and I always get a few earwigs indoors in damp weather. The cats usually take care of them for me. But for some reason, this year the earwigs have been coming inside way, way more than usual. They’re everywhere. I used to spray some pretty harsh chemicals around my back door every spring to keep spiders and earwigs outside where they belong, but I’ve been really sensitive to chemicals lately and am trying to lessen or eliminate their use when I can. So maybe that’s why we’re seeing more. But I may have to bust out the pesticides, because Sammi and I are living in fear.

Earwigs are sneaky little bastards, because they are flat and like to hide out in small weird spaces like the folds of a dishcloth or in between sheets of paper. And they hang out there and then BAM! the next thing you know there’s an earwig, and those little fuckers are FAST. They might run across your hand before you even realize they’re there.

Sammi and I have been seeing so many of them this year that we can’t be bothered to use two syllables when discussing them. Now we just call them wigs. So now when I encounter my nightly wig and start screaming and flailing, Sammi can just go, “Wig?” instead of having to say, “What is the problem? Is an earwig sighting making you scream and flail?” So like when I was doing the image search and we were greeted with a page full of larger than life pictures of them, it sounded kind of like this: “WIGS! WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGS I HATE THEM I HATE THEM AUGH!!!!!! WIGS! MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT GO AWAY I HATE THE WIGS!!!”

Sometimes we see a wig and we think it’s dead and then it starts moving. And I think the cats are getting used to them. They used to be really good about chasing them down and killing them, but the other morning I came downstairs for breakfast and the cats and the wigs were all playing Guitar Hero together in my living room. The wigs are very dexterous and seem to be pretty good at the expert levels. Sometimes I’m hanging out watching TV and I go to the bathroom and I have to wait because a wig is in there using my toilet. I think they’re drinking my Scotch when I’m at work, too. The level in the bottle keeps mysteriously dropping.

If Sam and I are ever lacking for something to talk about in the evenings, we can always talk about the wigs. Sammi saw a wig in the sink this morning. I saw a wig playing dead by my phone when I went to take it off the charger. Sammi spent half a night in bed convinced a wig was crawling on her foot. I saw one on my covers before I got in one night, though I think it rode upstairs on something else. Wigs seem to prefer to stay low. We saw a wig above the back door the other night and effectively dealt with it by screaming for a while. The internet might claim they’re harmless, but I think they are emotional terrorists.

We haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate the wigs. Hate them. But we’re not sure how to make them go away.