you are not alone!

Oooh-ooh, that must have been a bedbug!
You know, a chinch can't bite that hard.

--Blind Lemon Jefferson, "That Black Snake Moan"


Especially if you live in a big city, you are not alone. But you knew that.

However, it's not human companionship I'm speaking of here. The bedbugs have returned, and like the cock-a-roach they swarm in big cities.

I didn't read all of Orkin's list of the 50 US metro areas most overrun by bugs, but I noticed my old Seattle-Tacoma metropolis ranks 13, which means we're only slightly worse off than the Bay Area at #14.

Richmond, VA at #12 is the only southern city other than Dallas near the top tiers of the afflicted, and Virginia's not even all that southern any more -- they went for Obama both times. Then comes, Dayton, birthplace of AA and cash registers, then New York City, number 10.

The rest is pretty much what you'd expect with just a couple surprises. At #9 is Dallas-Fort Worth, then back to Ohio with the Lake Erie cities, Cleveland-Akron-Canfield. Then comes D.C. at #7, and then one more time Ohio again with Columbus (#6) and Cincinnati (#5).

Denver at #4 is kind of a surprise, but these bugs are travelers, and once they get a toehold they're hard to eradicate. The top three are the usual suspects -- LA, Detroit, and Chicago. Looks to me like everybody's got em, but the old industrial rust belt, where I spent my formative years, is catching this plague pretty hard.

I wonder if it is a plague, like the ones in Exodus. Let's see, they had flies, frogs, drought (I think), it rained blood, other bad stuff happened, and Passover, of course. But I don't think the Fay-ro was ever bit by bedbugs.

So verily I say unto you, brothers and sisters, Have a good night, sleep tight, and don't let the bedbugs bite. And if you sleep tight, those nasty bugs surely won't bite, because sleeping tight can only be done on a string bed, whose strings have to be periodically tightened to prevent them from getting loose and saggy. No mattress, no bedbugs. That's one way to get rid of em.