An early Halloween treat, or why Bruce Wayne is THE MAN!!!

This man.

Is my hero. Now more than ever. May I tell you why?

So my darling wife and I come home from doing laundry and skyping my parents (internet still hasn't happened at the Bugg Basement) and I head to our tiny bathroom. I notice something in our tub. This is hardly out of the ordinary. Being a basement apartment, it lacks a certain level of ventilation. So, to prevent an accumulation of moisture which could lead to mold in our (tiny) bathroom, we shower with the window open and leave it open to let the steam escape. This isn't a brilliant process, but ironically the bathroom window is our only one without a screen, so we've stuck with it, and the wind has occasionally picked up some debris to let it flutter down and litter our bathtub. Leaves, a sprinkling of dirt, nothing huge. And then, of course, there are the guests that crawl into our home. On all eight of their legs. Upon my wife's request, I am, or rather my footwear is, less than hospitable. But this something in our tub is not one of the usual visitors. This one is much larger.

In an agonizingly slow two seconds my brain juggles various identities to award this guest. A rock? A rat? A frog? A ba-

...

I close the door immediately, leaving the light on in the (tiny) bathroom.

"Honey," I force a strained smile. "Don't go in there."

Normally that phrase is used in our house after our (tiny) facilities are put to use, so naturally her eyebrows raise in a silent query.

I steel myself before opening the door yet again to investigate further. It could be a toad. Some poor frog hopped through the window and has been stuck in our tub drying out for hours. Poor thing. Poor brown indiscernible lumpy mass. But wait, what's that twig protruding from its chest? Something is definitely sticking out from the toad's torso. Has it been impaled? No that's not a twig. What could it be except some bizarre limb... an arm...

... or a wing.

I close the door once again, and reluctantly inform her of my suspicions. Just to be sure, I crack the door open a third time. Definitely not a toad. ...But it's not moving. And it's rather small...

And with one simple vowel change, my brain switched from "Ewwww" to "Awwww" A poor defenseless baby bat had taken it's final flight into our tub. Sad. Even sweet, really.

I close the door once more and prepare to dispose of the remains. After all, as my wife has often informed me when arachnids make their presence known, I'm the man, this is my job. I don a hoodie, pull the hood up, place a garbage bag in a box and grab our broom to sweep it in, close the bag and toss the poor creature, preventing my wife from ever seeing the cruel hand Nature dealt it. I reach the broom out, still keeping all but my arms out of the room. It's inches away. Poor thing, I think. It's really quite a tender little -

And then, like the Devil himself erupting out of the fiery maw of Hell, a wing shoots up like some torturous, sadistic jack-in-the-box.

- a tender little BEAST! IT'S EVIL, VILE WRETCHED FILTH KILL IT KILL IT I'M IN HELL GET BACK YOU MISERABLE SPAWN OF SATAN YOU SHALL NOT DEVOUR ME O FOE OF ALL THE EARTH BACK I SAY DON"T LET IT TOUCH ME KILL IT KILL IT GAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I of course didn't say any of this. Terror struck me dumb, but for a few shuddering noises I made as I wrenched back my broom and box and slammed the door shut. But I like to think my brain is much more articulate than the rest of me in moments of panic like that.

By now it's after 11:00pm, no exterminator can come until tomorrow (like we could afford one), and its our only bathroom. With no answers coming to us, my wife heads upstairs to our neighbor, who's having a little party with some friends. While I rip my hair out down in our living room, pacing helplessly, she pokes her head in and asks, "Hey, random question, but does anyone here know how to get rid of a bat?" Her inquiry is well met by her friends. They are from California, they explain and bat disposal is apparently a common dilemma. One young woman is particularly "game." An eager twinkle in her eyes, she takes command of the situation. First, she instructs one of her fellow partiers to "hold her booze," and then asks me if we have a towel, pillowcase or T-shirt which we don't particularly care about. I proffer her a towel and she boldly swings the door open, gives voice to my aforementioned (and inappropriately placed) mental "Awwww" and deftly scoops up the vile creature, cooing something about how they're cute, almost like a chihuahua with wings, all under the lens of the iPhone camera held by her booze-carrying counterpart. Cute? Blasphemy.

She carries it to a brick wall on a house opposite ours and, once freed, it climbs up of its own accord. We thank the inebriated strangers as well as our neighbor, discuss our now shared suspicion that the chirping we've heard coming from the gutters on one of the corners of the house seems to only be heard at night, and agree to express our concerns about a nest to our landlady. We SLAM the bathroom window shut, scour the shower clean, and take a much-needed shower, trying not to think about the recent occupant.

Bugs don't creep me out (insert last-name-pun here). Spiders, no problem. Ants? Annoying. Moths? I'll push through my childhood phobia and kill them. Flies? Maddening. Roaches? Juicy. Which is why I keep my winter boots out. Heck, give me some combat boots and I could even handle scorpions. But anything - I mean ANYTHING with fur, claws, a discernible heartbeat, beady eyes observing me like some hellish demon, or with wings to rise into the night and haunt innocents? Mommy.

Which brings me back to my original point:

This could never be me.

There is a moment in Batman Begins, when Bruce Wayne faces his fear, embraces his dread, and stands stock still amidst a pillar of bats fluttering around him. I now know I could NEVER. DO. THAT.

So, just in case the last two movies hadn't proved it to you, go see Dark Knight Rises and see if it can get through your thick skull that not only Batman, but

BRUCE WAYNE IS THE MAN!!!

On Blogging...

I've sat back and watched social media transform over the years with mild amusement and milder interest. It seems like by the time I was technologically competent for blogging, it was outdated. True enough, many of my blogger friends have gone the way of the world, sucked into the void of pointless showing off that Facebook has become.

Social media is still in its infancy. Or at least its adolescence.

Regardless, it doesn't know who it is and neither do we. Myspace started out as an online bulletin board of sorts but quickly imploded on itself in its poor defense against spam, porn, and coding errors. For a time, I thought Facebook had learned its lesson from its predecessor.

Finally! A spam-free environment in which we could all keep tabs on each other (a necessity for a frequent mover like yours truly) and stay in touch in each other's lives in an unobtrusive and inexpensive way.

And yet, somewhere along the line, we began poking, throwing sheep, announcing how tired we are, letting the world know how great this movie is, how lame that book was, announcing to the internet that "It's SOOOO NAPTIME!!! <3 and other updates on the sundry minutia.

And so, in an effort to break away from the sea of duckfaced girls, Memes, sports rants and game invites I'm going back to the blog.  The tried and true online journal that can be checked on by friends and family to stay in touch in a very basic way.

This is an important time in our lives.  These days of our marriage's infancy deserve some chronicling, and more detail and reflection than is normally offered in the average status update.  Now are the days when we really start to learn each other. 

We won't be perfect.  We'll test each other.  We'll be clumsy. 
We'll argue, we'll disagree, we'll fall more in love each day. 

We're not perfect.

But we're not supposed to be.



We're still working out the Buggs.