I had a good night.
I slept tight.
I should have known I was forgetting something.
I was very disappointed to learn that bed bugs really exist. I was even more disappointed to learn that they really do bite.
What really got me upset though, was when I learned that they bite me.
My wife and I recently discovered that we have a colony of bed bugs living in our mattress. To my wife, this was a disgusting and extremely annoying inconvenience. To me it was just plain shocking.
I don't think I would have been anymore surprised to wake up and find a unicorn chewing on my foot.
I probably wouldn't have been anymore shocked if I had found a small family of tooth fairies living in our closet.
Before the moment of actually seeing the bed bug crawling around our bed and the 45 minutes on Wikipedia doing bug related research (did you know that there's an entry for wet T-shirt contests) I would be more likely to believe that the strange bite marks we had been finding all over our bodies were from the Utah Chupacabra (much rarer than the Mexican variety).
I think the reason I would be more ready to accept on of these other supernatural possibilities over the prefect natural bed bugs is that until I smashed one with my own bare hands, I had no idea that bed bugs were perfectly natural.
Until the job people of the Internet gave me the low down, the only source I'd even heard of bed bugs from was my mom. Now my mother may make the best meatloaf on the planet. She, however, is no entomologist.
Ever since I've been legally able to ignore everything my mom told me, I've been operating under the assumption that everything my mother told me was wrong. I retroactively applied this theory to all the things she had told me in the past.
Since from the time I was in feety pajamas my mother warned me of two things, bed bugs and the witch that would come out of the kitchen closest after my bed time (my mother was an expert at child manipulation).
Now I have to accept that fact that my mom, the same women who told me that if ate all my vegetables I'd grow up big and strong like Superman (four hundred pounds of broccoli later I'm still only 5 foot 5 and get beat up by fifth graders on a regular basis), was actually right about something.
This changes everything, I literally have to rethink the way I view the whole world.
If there really are bed bugs, then maybe some of the other crap my mom told me was right too.
Maybe the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus really are watching me all the time, judging whether I got candy or underwear each year.
Maybe fat kids really do have feelings.
Wow, maybe some day I really will regret hitting my sister in the face with my yellow wiffle bat.
Nah, probably not that one.
That's it for me, I'm off to kill more bed bugs, that's what I do now.
Geek on.
Steve Shinney is an former super gullible six-year-old who, once he got used the idea of his mom's competence is really enjoying having a whole new species to squish.
