I rent an apartment from a buddy of mine and it is a bit “under construction.”

Which is fine because he’s my buddy; and I lived like a squatter for years, so no big whup.

But I recently re-remembered an old bit of squatter know-how called, “turn off the friggin lights.”

Primarily because light attracts insects. And if you leave the lights on in the bathroom and there’s a bit of open wall in your house… it will fill with flies.

Which isn’t a big deal either, but it reminded me of a good repressed memory.

This was about six or seven years ago and I lived in one of those creepy awesome 100 year old houses on Young. One of my roommates had this disgusting, hateful monitor lizard, and he fed it mice.

(Never in my life have I had such an overt animosity with an animal. That thing would start hissing at me whenever I entered the room. The feeling was completely mutual.)

One day Bob fed it too many mice and it killed one and stuffed it under a rock.

I’ll spare you the biological details, but that dead mouse turned into about 10,000 flies.

I walked into the bathroom that morning; and while today’s little surprise was mildly annoying, that was like something out of the twilight zone.

There were thousands of flies covering the walls and the ceiling. Big green meat flies that are all slow and stupid and don’t even move when you swat them.

I walked out of the room and shut the door. I was about 40-45% sure what I had just seen wasn’t real. (It happens.)

I opened the door again and looked inside. There they were, a shifting green curtain of bugs.

I thought “Well… nevermind.”

Then I went back to bed.

The end.

Sorry that’s the best story I could think of today… if you have a better one I’m standing right here listening.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Memphis Overnight. 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.