When walking down memory lane, always bring a machete.

So in the course of talking to my friends this weekend, as I am wont to do, I came across an old memory that I forgot I had. It was still perfectly good, if a little dusty, and to be completely honest, I can't believe I've never blogged about it on these forums before.
This memory starts back in my last days of college or a little after. We were in a relatively new 2-bedroom apartment that, now that I think back on it, was the nicest apartment I've lived in to date. Ground floor, one story, large common area with a big kitchen, and I had a huge bathroom all to myself. My room was nicely placed to the east, so I got great sun in the morning and great shade in the evening. The apartment complex was new, but this is Texas, a fact which explains the ensuing story.
It was at the tail end of spring, and the world was beginning to show signs of the searing Central Texas summers that fostered me into a sun-hating adulthood. Things that were outside wanted inside into the cool air-conditioning, and those of us that were inside took great exception to that fact. This was caused by the reality that most of the creatures that wanted inside had more than four legs.
One day, as I was going about my life, I went into my lovely, huge bathroom that was mine and no one else's and found that it was occupied. It wasn't occupied by anyone that lived there or was visiting, or even by an animal, as this was in the days before I got her royal Fuzziness (also known as my cat).
No, it was a roach. And not just an ordinary roach. It was a gigantic Texas waterbuck roach, as big as the average Hissing Cockroach, and if you've never seen those, let me help you out with the imagery. Imagine a dog. The size of an elephant. Now give it six legs. Okay, you're caught up with the rest of us.
This roach was luxuriating in my bath tub, smoking a stoagie and sipping on a snifter full of cognac. When it saw me, it simply flashed a deuce and kept reading the newspaper.
I do not like roaches. During the dawning of mankind, the natural enmity that was supposed to be placed between woman and snake missed in its shot from me and hit the roaches. As I didn't have any Raid or Hotshot handy, I grabbed the nearest thing and began to spray. Crisp Linen Lysol does not work as well as Raid or Hotshot. I chased that thing around the bottom of the tub for fifteen minutes screaming "IT WON'T DIE! IT WON'T DIE!" I think it finally drowned. I washed it down the drain and sat for a moment trembling in a cloud of Crisp-Linen scented freshness. It took several shock therapy sessions, but at last I was able to forget the incident and use that bathroom again without a flame thrower.

But in the insect world, there is apparently a code that says when one of ours kills one of theirs, there must be a blood hunt. This particular roach's family apparently found it necessary to send Slaughterbob the Ender after me. A few weeks after my initial kill, I was on the phone with a friend, looked up, and saw that above the spinning fan blades on the ceiling, there was a roach even larger than the first one. It had Rambo-style camo face paint on, camo fatigues, and had a grenade launcher on his shiny little roach shoulder. I know I went dead silent on the phone, but in my head a thousand screaming voices cried out a bad word in unison.

Now, I know most of you that haven't seen one of these roaches will have a hard time believing me, but I swear it's true. The theme music from Mission Impossible began to play, and the roach dropped down between the spinning fan blades and hit the floor with a thud. I felt the ground shake, no lie. Then it did a serpentine body crawl under the nearby sofa. I jumped onto a chair, afraid that a smoldering grenade would shoot out from under that couch and cut me off at the ankles.

But no, what happened next was still more horrifying. I looked around the corner of the sofa tentatively to see the roach charging into my room. My lovely little cozy east-facing room. This meant war. I leapt down off my chair with the age-old southern battle cry of "Naaaah!" and ran after it.

The nearest missile I could find to throw was a shoe. Now, this was back in my Hippie vintage fatigue jacket and worn jeans days, so it wasn't a normal shoe that I seized, but a five-pound birkenstock. I threw it at the horse---I mean, roach, and watched in disbelief as the shoe began to scrabble across the floor propelled by six clicking legs. In an unprecidented show of bravery, I leapt on top of the shoe and jumped up and down, listening for the "crunch" that would signal victory. The crunch never came, but I was pitched off the top of the shoe by a mighty heave.

Okay, you want to play it hard, we'll play it hard, I thought. Whereupon I used my standard issue forklift to hoist one my nursing school textbooks that (back me up on this, Corrie) weighed as much as a third-world country. I lowered it down on top of the shoe as hard as I could without cracking a crater in the foundation, then went to hide in my closet.

To avoid dragging the story out any longer, it took a good half-hour for the textbook to stop moving, and I left it there for a few days before I had the nerve to pick it up and see the carnage underneath. The roach was dead, one middle finger extended toward me. I still have the tiny grenade launcher somewhere in storage.

Now, what did we learn from the epic Battle of The Roach? Simply this: Always keep a broadsword handy in the house.