By Richard Black of The Unfit Father
Most of the time, around December, people write a couple of sentences and maybe a paragraph or two on Facebook, in a card, or even in a publication about the blessings they’ve received over the past year and the trials they’ve overcome. Some chipper folks, presumably under the dubious influence of illicit pharmaceuticals, also write a few words of hope about the coming year
This is not one of those pieces.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy to see the ass end of 2015. 2015 has been like a hooker you end up with after a four-day binge and hope to get out of your home before she chokes on her own vomit and dies. 2015, I feel safe noting, has been something of a challenge.
Of course, the year didn’t start out that way. In January I had every reason to be hopeful. Our contractor had just started gutting the home we had just purchased, my daughter was more or less cheerily engaged in pre-school, and my wife was working hard to keep me in the style to which I’ve become accustomed. I was, in short, atypically optimistic.
In the boozy afterglow of the New Year, I even had the hubris to mention to my wife, and I quote, “I think this might be our year.” I was wrong. So very, very wrong. 2015 was by even the most generous accounts a clusterfuck of biblical proportions. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.
In the past twelve months, my family and I have incurred nothing less than the wrath of a higher power. Call it fate, or God, or even Bob, but I’ve managed to piss someone off and in doing so brought down a terrifying retribution in the form of three plagues.
The first involved an infestation of bats. We didn’t know we had bats — most people don’t — and then one day, one was dive bombing my wife and daughter and I in our bedroom during the wee hours of the morning. Now, like most people, I love bats. They do great things and eat bugs and such. They pollinate flowers and also, from time to time, are known to carry rabies. Not often, granted, but bats are found with rabies frequently enough to cause concern amongst some people, particularly my wife.
The only way to determine if a bat carries rabies is by examining its brain. This is bad news for the bat, assuming he or she possessed the mental faculties necessary to be aware of what was in store. Six hours after we discovered our new house guest, three men, each named Dale, from three separate companies spent all of five minutes going over my home before declaring, “I can’t find ‘im but he’ll more than likely show up ‘round dusk.” A fourth man, also named Dale, spent five minutes in our home but distinguished himself from his competition by finding the beast. The bat, also strangely enough named Dale, was destroyed, examined, and found to be free from rabies.
My family and I rejoiced for all of a few weeks in the knowledge that we weren’t going to be subjected to multiple rounds of painful injections before our home was promptly infested with pantry moths. What’s the big deal with moths, you ask? For starters, once they’ve been housed and fed, much like in-laws in your living room, they’re pretty much impossible to remove. The larvae can crawl and hide behind the paper on a can of soup, eat through plastic bags, sneak into airtight canisters, and live on nothing more than a few flakes of pepper.
It was around the time I finished disinfecting our entire kitchen and its contents with bleach every day for about three months (in addition to setting off a low-yield nuclear device on weekly intervals) that I found my daughter’s curly blond locks to be teeming with lice.
[/nextpage] [nextpage title=”Page 2″ ]If you’ve never dealt with a lice infestation, I highly encourage you to forgo the experience, unless, of course, you enjoy doing a lot of laundry and pawing through your child’s hair like an obsessive gibbon on crystal meth. Lice are curious creatures. They can survive for more than twelve hours without breathing, rendering a go in the washing machine much like a stay at the water park for the little bastards. Only a prolonged round in the dryer on high heat kills lice or their eggs. Extreme cold works as well. A stay of 24 hours in the freezer will also do them in. The problem, of course, is that most people, even really small ones, can’t fit into a freezer or a dryer.
To complicate matters, it turns out that my little slice of heaven in the Midwest is infested with a strain of the buggers inventively named Super Lice. Super Lice don’t fly or even jump off of tall buildings, but they are pretty much immune to conventional over-the-counter remedies. Of course, I only learned that after spending a few hundred dollars at the local pharmacy and a few dozen more hours combing through my daughter’s and my wife’s hair before I finally enlisted the help of a professional. Twice.
In the background, during each and every one of these delightful incidents, was the ongoing hell that is known as a home renovation. Most projects of this magnitude can be emotionally taxing. Combine it with a contractor who has the drive, work ethic, and communication skills of a toaster oven and the scope for disaster quickly rises to one requiring federal intervention.
I’m not prone to exaggeration, but a lemming in heat would have been easier to deal with than our former contractor. In his wake, we have been left with bathroom floor tiles that cut bare feet, grout that hasn’t been sealed, closets with shelves and bars that collapse because they weren’t drilled into studs, in addition to myriad other little quirks and whims of his presumably drug-addled mind.
It has been, in short, one hell of a year, and it’s not even over. Even now as I write, my daughter has managed to cover everything in her bed with vomit, not once or twice, but three times in the past four days. When I haven’t been cooking or cleaning or otherwise entertaining anywhere from three to seven house guests over the course of the week, I’ve been washing the recycled remains of chocolate and apples off of every sheet, pillowcase, and duvet cover we’ve ever owned. It has truly been a magical time of year.
I’m not sure what can happen between now and the time before 2015 finally comes to a close, but not much would shock me. Locusts? Why not? An infestation of frogs? Sure. If a tornado were to scoop up a few hundred used anal plugs from a second hand sex shop and deposit them in my front lawn, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. I’d love to be able to enjoy the remnants of the year, but I’ve had enough of 2015.
You’ll have to forgive me now. I’ve got to go. In preparation for 2016, I’m building an underground bunker in the event my home is leveled by an asteroid, destroyed by Sharknado, or swarmed by giant carnivorous bees, and when I’m not obsessing over those possibilities, I’ll be praying that 2016 is an entirely dull and thoroughly uneventful year.
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About Richard Black