Jiminy Must Die

In the tradition of Mickey Must Die and Mickey Must Die, A Reprise I am continuing the epic saga of my battle against pest invasion. This time it’s crickets.

Crickets have been appearing in my house by the score lately. I guess they come inside where it’s warm in the autumn, just like mice. I do not appreciate the extra company. The chirping at night drives me crazy, and it is next to impossible to find the little guys and eradicate them. Ergo, I have a Cricket Problem.

Apparently spiders have an easier time of finding the crickets than I do. This is why I have spiders the size of dinner plates under my bed. A diet of 3 or 4 pounds of crickets per day seems to encourage their growth, imagine that. It also encourages their boldness. I now have to wait up to half an hour to use the bathroom in the morning; the queue of spiders also waiting to get in is a surly one and does not put up with cutting in line. At least I have hygienic spiders.

My cat Mimi loves the crickets as well. She doesn’t exactly eat them, at least not right away. She likes to play with them a little first, and from a cricket’s point of view, she plays rough. I am continually finding cricket legs and wing bits all over the floor from this sport. As it happens, I’m actually glad she goes for the crickets instead of bigger game. Evidently she’s also learned not to fuck with the spiders.

I used to feed the crickets I caught to my Jack Dempsey, when I still had a Jack Dempsey. If you don’t know, Jack Dempseys are pugnacious freshwater tropical fish. They are a member of the Cichlid family, and originally come from South America if I remember correctly. My Jack was a beautiful and deadly cricket-killing machine. I’d drop a cricket in the tank, it would struggle a little bit, then BAM! the Dempsey would hit it and there would be just a small bit of cricket leg left in the water. To my great chagrin, an ex-girlfriend murdered my finny pal one day when I wasn’t home. To get even I defenestrated her Shih Tzu.

I might have been dreaming, but I thought I recently read that somebody built a robot that could home in on cricket sounds in the house. I can’t find the article any longer, but I can only hope that the little robot also comes equipped with an automatic weapon of some sort, both to snuff the cricket chanteuse and to defend itself. In my house, the spiders would probably resent the competition and dismantle it. Then they’d trap me in a web and force me to disclose the name of the maker. I can’t be held accountable for what might happen then, but if I were the robot inventor I’d start wearing a fake nose and mustache when I left the house.

In the face of the recent cricket influx it occurred to me to wonder what crickets eat. According to the Insecta Inspecta, whoever the hell that is, must be Vinegar Man’s cousin:

"Crickets feed on just about anything. They will eat plants, dead insects, seeds, leather, paper and old cloth (especially if the cloth is stained by food or perspiration). They are particularly fond of wool and silk."

Great. Not only do they keep me awake at night, they will also eat my books, my sheets, my underwear and my leather Dominator costume. Time to order the damn robot, I guess.

Maybe I can somehow convince the crickets to leave my house without needing to engage in cricket genocide. Maybe they’ll decide to move to Brooklyn and become cockroaches.

- Hulles