Creative cruelty

05-12-2007

12-01-2008

(pictures received by email)

24-01-2008

24-01-2008

Many cockroaches have died. They die every night, so that every next day I hope they’re all dead. But they’re not. The temporary solution is to never walk barefoot. Remember Indiana Jones in the dark cave with the blonde girl? It’s pretty much the same, and if the sound doesn’t bother me, feeling it on my gentle skin is a different story. The extermination method is however quite neat: it seems the poison works partly by contagion; since the bastards eat their fellow dead, the undigested poison sort of goes on killing. Creative, no? Changing topics, I deeply suspect that somebody is doing the same to container trucks in Luanda: they’re dropping like bugs, staying for hours on end with their wheels up, waiting for death to come. As I cannot yet tell when a truck has eaten one of its kind, these days I stay away from every truck I see.

Cockroaches

“Any of numerous oval, flat-bodied insects of the family Blattidae, including several species that are common household pests.” Sometimes looking at definitions has a reassuring feeling to it… not this time. The whole thing is getting slightly Kafkaesque: the day is not far when I come home after a day’s work, and find them cockroaches chilling on my sofa, watching TV and drinking beer, a number of their legs spread over the low glass table; going on to complain that I work too much, that we never talk, insisting that I please come and sit with them. It is getting out of control... They no longer stay in the kitchen, area that they have long ruled, and from which they enthusiastically persuaded me to stay away. They have now started to inhabit the toilet, the bedrooms and the living room. Indeed, I suspect that one of them is now a real estate agent, successfully promoting the kitchen suburbs; ”yeah, you have to commute, but look at the view...plus the neighbours are a completely different breed!”. The day is not far when they simply change the door lock, throw a party and ‘forget’ to invite me. The day is not far, unless the exterminator comes. He said he would come tomorrow.