Nuclear Family Warhead

Love Drive, Loving You Sunday Morning, The Zoo, Blackout, No One Like You, Big City Nights, Rock You Like A Hurricane, Still Loving You. Recognize those? Some of them? They’re all songs by the German rock band Scorpions.  This was the band who’s lead singer learned English by SINGING it.  No lie.  That’s why you can still hear; on Rock You Like A Hurricane, the line; Waaahhhk Yu Lie-ka Ho-a-cayne, Baybay!  He sounds like Shultz from Hogan’’s Heroes: “I saw Nut-ting! I saw Nut-ting!”  Can you tell I was never a really big fan?  Oh, sure, they’ve got some decent songs; Big City Nights has a great guitar intro, for instance, but I never went all goo-goo over them.  Maybe it was my aversion to their namesake insect that pushed me away. 

When we lived in El Paso, Scorpions were everywhere.  In the lighting fixtures, under the dresser, under the couch cushions; and on AOR radio stations.  We moved into a house that had been vacant for a year before we bought it.  During the clean up before we moved in I counted 54 dead scorpions.  FIFTY FOUR!  Guess how many were still living there to torment us?  I lost count at 60 or 65.  I crawled through the 130 degree heat in the attic laying out insecticide as I retreated back to the attic stairs.  There’s no such thing as a ”walk-in” attic in El Paso; in fact, a lot of the houses are Southwestern architecture and are flat roofed anyway.  This trip to the attic was necessary due to the fact that as Nukeboy1 lay asleep on the couch one night (he was a year and a half at the time), NukeMom and I witnessed a scorpion crawl out of the couch about 2 inches from his head.  The freak factor on that is 11.  Why didn’t we just make our freak factor bigger and make 10 the biggest freak?  Because our freak amplifiers go to 11, that’s why. 

These weren’t the deadly kind of scorpions, but any scorpion sting is going to hurt; and if you’re a little boy who is only a year and half old, you’re definitely going to remember the experience.  We got him off of the couch and got the scorpion before he could run and hide, but God, I hate those things!  I don’t hate them with a jump-on-a-chair-and-scream-like-a-girl-hate, I hate them with that deep down furious anger hate.  That: “If I see one I’m going to smash it with my shoe until there’s nothing left to smash” hate.  Then I’m going to burn the shoe.  Then I’m going to mix the ashes in concrete and drop it in a lake.  After the concrete has set, of course.  That’s some serious bug-hate.  I’d come home from work and see one hanging on the ceiling.  I’d kill it, sit down on the couch to watch some TV, then while stretching see another one on the ceiling.  Right.  Above.  My.  Head.  Try watching Six Feet Under with that.  It took us almost a year to get it down to where we would only see one or two a month, but that’s still too many in my opinion.  To answer your question; hell yeah I checked my shoes everyday before putting them on!  Six months later we moved to North Carolina and our scorpion days were over.  Or so we thought.

Here is a picture of what crawled out from underneath my refrigerator yesterday.  This is a borrowed photo from the Internet because there is nothing left for me to photograph myself.  Remember that shoe-wielding furious anger hate I told you about?  The SOB just walked out, right in front of me, Nukeboy1 and Nukegirl.  Like he was the opening comedienne on a 3 man bill coming back out to introduce the headliner; “H-h-heey!  Alright folks, give it up again for Dash Quagmire!  What a funny guy!  Don’t forget to take care of your cocktail waitresses….” I mean, the ‘nads on this guy!  What did he think was going to happen?  Was he expecting food?  Like we were going to fillet and saute some spider for him or something?  He just darted out, sat there, waited for the shoe and then disappeared in a cornucopia of obscenities and shoe pummels.  Sorry Nukegirl, Nukeboy1, God.  Oh, and NukeMom (I don’t think Nukegirl will remember any of those words, and Nukeboy1 is a 5th grader; he’s already heard most  of them).  I’m still not sure if he was a native North Carolina scorpion, or a hitchhiker from El Paso that had survived for 7 years under our refrigerator living off of pet dander and attitude.  I didn’t have time to buy him a beer and chit chat.  I looked it up online, they have no clue how long these things can last.  Next to cockroaches; scorpions are the insect least likely to obtain domestication status in my home.  Call PETA on me, I don’t care.  Have Pamela Anderson throw fake blood on me; won’t do any good.  If I see ‘em, they’re dead.  End of story.  Where’s my shoe?

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