When I Was a College Senior, Girls Would Frequently Knock at My Dorm Room Door

asking to borrow my vacuum cleaner. It seems I had the only privately owned vacuum in the dorm, or at least the most accessible one. Looking back on it this seems bizarre, but in those days I took things as they came. I was given to reflect on this today because I realized that I have become totally slovenly, not having vacuumed in weeks (or, in some remote corners of the house, months). The difference between then and now is that I have learned that none of it matters. Dirty, clean, so what? The impetus for all this ultimately nihilistic soul-searching and ugly flashbackage was likely The First Cockroach of the Season -- fucker came up from the drain to do a little puttering about in my bathtub. I wonder if cockroaches have devices like anti-bathyscaphes -- aeroscaphes, if you will -- in which they venture from the depths to explore the strange and terrifying surface world. Also if they suffer from nitrogen narcosis. Frankly, I am unused to seeing cockroaches -- the environment here is generally a bit arid for them -- but I do have 1920s-vintage plumbing and I am pretty damned close to Mexico. Unfortunately this vision put me in such a paranoid mood that I subsequently squashed a pinacate beetle thinking he was a roach. Quite outside of the damage to my karma I shall regret this all night.