Centipedes and Interior Design

My landlord’s wife recently observed upon entering my house, “This place looks like a bachelor pad.” She may have had a point. I share the house with one other single male and we both share a certain –how shall I say this?- -lack of concern- with décor. After all, it’s very convenient to store your surfboards in the living room especially when there’s not a lot of furniture to compete with for space. There IS a couch and a comfy one at that. There’s a table which has an exciting kind of rock to it when you lean on it and only three of the eight chairs are broken. There’s no artwork on the walls, not even a poster of a scantily clad woman to complete the effect, but there are some screws in the wall so that if we ever decided to hang something we would be half way there.

What’s really remarkable is our collection of cups and glasses. There must be at least 50 of all shapes and sizes. No two match. It’s as if someone went around collecting all the drinking receptacles that didn’t sell at garage sales and brought them here. While it’s great to have a variety of vessels to choose from when you pour yourself some water, I wish we had more than two bowls. If anybody wants to film one of those reality shows where they re-do (or in this case just do) your home décor this might be the place work on. Otherwise we probably won’t be doing any fancy entertaining.
Of course we do have lots of guests of the insect variety. The ants are so firmly established and seem so small and harmless that I hardly notice them anymore. Just brush them off whatever your eating and chow down. I’m not so nonchalant about the cockroaches. Have you ever considered that cockroaches don’t actually do any harm. They don’t bite you and they seem to make an effort to stay out of your way, remaining hidden most of the time and only coming out at night. Their only real crime is being hideous. It’s sort of like The Phantom of the Opera. Someone should write a musical about that. Nevertheless, I swat them with a rolled up magazine whenever I see them. Their numbers seem to be diminishing but I don’t know if that’s because of my killing spree or if I have all those cute little chirping geckos to thank.

I’m just grateful that the centipedes haven’t found our little love shack. They are definitely NOT harmless. I’m not squeamish but I recently heard some centipede stories so bad that I’m not going to detail them here out of sensitivity to some of my centipede-phobic readers. Suffice to say these stories revolved around the centipede’s apparent instinct to seek out the warmth of the human body.

So maybe centipedes aren’t all that bad after all. They like to snuggle. And this photograph I took actually shows the centipede’s caring and maternal nature as it gathers together its mass of wriggling off-spring which I had scattered when I poked them with a stick. Maybe it’s that just that feminine touch that my house is missing.