cool dry place

You can’t just waltz into November without thinking ahead and expect to escape alive with a story to tell. That’s jackass thinking. You gotta lay down some goals first. Set aside a day or two in late October to sketch out some concepts in that navy blue spiral-bound notebook you’re always carrying around with you. Scrawl in your loose shorthand vague objectives like “seek shelter” and “have religious experience” and “something fun with bodily fluids.” Just let it all out on paper and don’t try to make sense of it yet. This month is going to throw a lot of shit at you and if you don’t have at least the bare and creaking scaffolding of a game plan to prop your sad self against you’ll be trampled into the dust by it.

Pay your phone bill. Wash your clothes. Flip that calendar page and stare boldly into the face of the damp and vengeful new month.

November has the face of a rhesus macaque this year and you need to find a new job where the stationery isn’t embarrassingly campy.

Mark down all your appointments and make it look like you’ve got everything pulled together and in control because tomorrow when you wake up in your brand new apartment you’ll have fleas and you’ll shit blood.

Yeah. Fleas. As Sherry said when she saw the dollar-store china plates on the wall above the window and the hand-painted (as in, craft store Hand-Painted Glass Kit: fun for all ages!) glassware left behind in a kitchen cupboard, the previous tenant was a cat lady. The place lacked the tell-tale smell when you first moved in, but that’s because the rest of the building smells like cigarettes and lavender Glade Hot Oil Plug-Ins. And the red hives on your ankles that you scratched so hard that they bled and pussed last night? Flea bites. Welcome to your classy new pad. It looks like you’ll have to do all your laundry again.

Go to the bathroom. Shit blood.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The blood comes after the shit. But it’s dark red and soaks through the toilet paper and the only word that comes to your head when you’re sitting there staring at it is “arterial.” That’s right, Einstein, you’ve ruptured your butt artery. Call your doctor first. Make an appointment. Call your girlfriend.

“Sherry, I have fleas.”

“I don’t think people get fleas,” she’ll say. “I think fleas just bite you.”

Say, “Isn’t that what having fleas is?”

Call your parents. You just hauled all your worldly crap out of their house and into this one, so there’s a distinct possibility that there was some parasite transfer.

“I don’t think people get fleas,” your mother will say.

Ask her if her dog has fleas.

“Yes, but only two.”

The dog is evil and everyone acknowledges this, but somehow no one can admit that she is affected to the same extent as you by the terrible blood-sucking insects that you saw hopping away from your swatting hand this morning while you were making the bed.

“Have you named them?”

She’ll put your sister on the phone. “Humans don’t get fleas. They can’t survive on a human host.”

But you are no ordinary human. You are covered in a very fine fuzz. The diabolical black death flecks are inhabiting your year-round sweater and feeding off your precious bodily fluids. And your family is collaborating with them.

“Do you have any flea bites, sister dear?”

“Well yeah, but only a few.”

Fantastic. To the internets!

According to Wikipedia, fleas can cause allergic reactions in their hosts that result in rashes and secondary infection. There’s a picture of a torso that looks just like your legs. You are vindicated! But wait: fleas can transmit tapeworms to their hosts. You saw a photograph of a tapeworm in science class in tenth grade and never fully recovered. You’ve been overcooking your pork for years. And all that careful, obsessive precaution amounts to nothing in the face of a few bugs who hitched a ride in the cuffs of your jeans and will proceed to ruin your weekend and your innards. You can feel the worms growing inside you, coiled in your intestine, their hook-toothed scolexes anchored in the soft intestinal lining, their bodies stretching for meters inside you, shedding fertilized egg pouches in your stool in the vain hope that some creature will ingest it and start the whole process over.

Clutch at your abdomen and claw at your skin and cry to the god you only talk to when bad shit’s happening and ask him why he has plagued you. Do the whole Job thing. He’s punishing you and you’ve been nothing but righteous. Let it all out. Wuss.

Sherry will come by with spray-on Solarcane, which is antibacterial and a topical anaesthetic. And it’s an aerosol so you don’t have to apply any oily gunk. Spray it all over yourself. It’ll make you so happy you’ll want to hump her leg. Cause goddamn how you hate gunk. Whiner.

She’ll vacuum your apartment and apply poison to the carpet and mattress while you do your laundry and fight with your parents and basically just lose control of your impulse to scream. She’s good at handling stress and you’re just a fucking basketcase. Tomorrow when you’re at work she’ll call a pharmacist who will say “I don’t think people get fleas,” and that no, there aren’t any “flea collars, but for humans” on the market right now. He’ll tell her that only a very hairy person could possibly support a population of fleas and then smirk while picturing such a person in his imagination.

But Sherry knows better than anyone that you are one supremely hairy son of a bitch. You’ve lain in bed with her head on your chest and told her stories of your youth. Your father called you Chimp-Boy when you were fourteen and you wore only long pants and long-sleeved shirts in even the hottest weather for an entire summer. On summer days in Wasaga Beach you used to chase people down the beach hollering “I am the Yeti!”

Your roommates in your first year of university called you Beardo even when you were clean-shaven.

With the generous support of your girfriend and family you will eventually fight off the flea scourge, to the great benefit of your mental health. Next week even your doctor will look disgusted when you show her your ankles. and though your shit has returned to its normal range of colours, the texture’s still off. It’s too soft, and you’re looking for more firmness. Your’ve always been concerned about consistency.

Your concern will be rewarded with a collect-your-own-feces kit and a blurry instruction sheet that looks like it’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Ever ride the bus carrying several ounces of your own stool dissolved in vials full of chemicals and barely obscured by the near-transparency of a grocery bag? Your horoscope for November reads “try new things with public transit.”

When the doctor tells you you don’t (and never did) have worms, it’ll be the happiest day of your life.

She’ll still be laughing about the flea story, though, and you can expect to hear about that for some time, because she still brings up the time she had to administer rabies shots to you and your brother after he brought home a friendly bat (who had chewed its own leg off) in his baseball glove when you were six.

Bottom line: steel yourself for a shitstorm this November. You’ll do fine.