In my dream, your mother was torturing bigfoot. That's what she did in reality too.

What would other writers do with the subject of cockroaches? To answer that, I guess we need to think about the salient points of a cockroach--it is brown, durable, dirty and an excellent mariachi musician. Some writers might go on to lament the cockroach's durability, to lament the fact that, of all the creatures that God could have chosen (you'll notice that other writers, even atheists, like to refer to God. I don't, not because I don't believe in Him, but because I am forward-looking and forsee a day when He becomes a licensed character and the other writers are sued for using His name. Another reason is that going back and capitalizing His Name and His Pronouns all over the place is difficult to remember.) to endow with the ability to survive a nuclear blast, the one He chose had to be a cockroach.

I don't lament this. I don't even know where people would get off lamenting it. After all, other writers aren't going to survive a nuclear blast themselves, so what do they care if there are cockroaches scuttling around afterwards. I, on the other hand, will survive a nuclear blast. That claim probably seems a bit bombastic to you (I didn't intend that pun and I'm thinking about changing that word to eliminate it), but you have never met me, so you are in no place to decide what I can and cannot survive. The last known person to survive an atom bomb blast was the Burgess Meredith character in that one Twilight Zone episode. I mean, aren't I just a small man with glasses who wanted nothing but time, or failing that, a mediocre actress and astonishingly poor musician who starred in Mean Girls?

Presented with this evidence, a hypothetical jury would probably find that I am better-placed than most to complain about cockroaches, since I'll still be dealing with them when you've all been vaporized. But note that I haven't been complaining. Perhaps that's because I've been providing explanations for the last two paragraphs. I couldn't tell you, really. But after taking the moral high ground I did three sentences ago, I would look like a "damn nerd," or for those of you not versed in the vernacular of my college dorm room, a hypocrite making an embarrassing climbdown. But come on, cockroaches?

At least it's not as bad as this: