My New Personal 9/11

It started out a day like any other.

As America slept, or at least the sane parts of America that don’t get up before 7 AM, a plot months, maybe years in the making was unfolding.

The only man who was there tells his story:
“I was sleeping when I felt this tickling on my shoulder. Then the tickling moved up to my neck. Then raced towards my mouth.”

What was it friends?
It was what we all feared.
It was what we all feared and thought, It’ll never happen to me…
It was the day that would change all the days to come, and all the days past when we looked fondly back upon them.

 

Yes, it was that.  It was a centipede.  Crawling towards my mouth.  In my own backyard.  Well, bedroom.  But that’s worse.

But after the dust settled, after the squirming centipede was photographed and Pete thought Well, there’s a blog for today, after the corpse was smashed and thrown in the garbage, we had to answer the tough question:

Where do we go from here?

We all still had to wake up the next morning.  More difficult, we all had to go to bed the next night.  We still had families, jobs, friends, loved ones.  We still had bills in our mailboxes and pizza door hangers on our doorknobs.

We thought about sleeping on the couch. But no.  That’s how the centipedes win.  Because the centipedes didn’t really want to destroy the sanctity of the bed.  They wanted to destroy a way of life.  They wanted to cripple us and push us the wrong way down a one way street in a wheelchair.

But we won’t let them.

Thanks to a lot of brave men and women.  Actually, no women.  Just one man.  Thanks to that one man, who in himself found the bravery of several women, many men, and maybe some goat thrown in there, the bed was reclaimed.