The Moths Are Mobilizing

In addition to the armed people who are trying to intimidate? state governments into opening everything by gathering in protest crowds near state capitols… because… they don’t “believe in” the coronavirus, science, hard data, global news reporting, or how New York City officials are digging mass graves…

the tenuous relationship between this apartment’s moths and I is also breaking down.

Backstory

Over the past year, these fucking moths have eaten holes in my most prized clothing.

“Oh you love this cashmere sweater? The cashmere sweater turtleneck that makes people think you are inexplicably Republican when you wear it? The one your dad gave you? The dad who is now dead and can never again give a Christmas gift to you? And the only cashmere anything you have? Yes. I am going to eat the shit out of that cashmere sweater.”

One Moth Who Lives Here, recorded just before committing the act

That sweater was shredded. 😭

But the moths also ate other, less sentimental clothing.

This clothing was far less sentimental than the gifted sweater but still highly prized because I’m shallow and also unemployed and thus a little possessive of my “nice remaining vintage things”.

Of course, I’m also filling empty plastic juice containers with filtered water and lining the cupboard floor with them for a future in which cashmere sweaters and other such bullshit will not be a concern.

So I’m making little sense. Like the armed militia who toured American cities this weekend.

But, regardless, I declared war on the apartment moths months ago. Thus, I bought a gigantic bag of mothballs and placed the little sealed bags around the apartment because I didn’t feel that they would work if I put the little mothball bags in another sealed container like the instructions say…

and then I got pretty sick and realized that mothballs are really fucking poisonous.

Ah yes.

And then I just retreated and the moths and I negotiated a ceasefire except for that didn’t really happen and they just kept on eating everything but now I was terrified of moth balls so I just detached the part of me that cared.

Material things mean nothing.

Until a couple weeks ago when I walked into our tiny bathroom and saw four moths, clinging to the nicely rolled pile of bath towels and the sight of four moths in the bathroom, combined with how I noticed that there was now a fresh hole in the shower curtain, caused me to break the fucking ceasefire and, if I had a flamethrower, I may have used it at that moment in time.

But, since I didn’t have a flamethrower, I pulled on the gloves that I’m basically always wearing now and got out the big bag of mothballs which I had stashed under the kitchen sink. I then put a couple mothball packs into a glass container, sealed it, and set that on top of the towels.

And then I took the gigantic bag of mothballs and just put it in my closet.

“ROT IN HELL MOTHS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

What a Neighbor Didn’t Hear on a Weeknight She Can’t Remember Because She Doesn’t Know and Never Hears Anything

Transference, perhaps. I’m no better than the armed militias who are asking state governors to wave their fairy wands and magically make a global pandemic and all the death and damage it has caused just disappear.

But. whatever, it WORKED.

We haven’t seen a moth since. Mothballs, if utilized appropriately, work.

But, and this brings me to the title of this post, days after my resurgence and seeming victory over the moths, I found this tissue was in the middle of the Kleenex box:

My husband says that single, random tissue must have been cut by one of the machines when it was made but

I know better.

Similar to how I also know that my broken, old, zombie iPhone 5c which was resurrected after my Pixel 3 died suddenly a few months ago still harbors resentment towards me.

I know this because last night, as I was brushing my teeth, I felt Only Child Lonely and tried to interact with my poor, destroyed zombie phone and it went like this:

So it made a prophecy

and then played a song I really don’t like. But the thing is… I had forgotten about that song and hadn’t listened to it or the band that played it in years.

So, in addition to the mystic abilities it apparently acquired in the other world, my zombie iPhone has not forgotten.

And it harbors resentment towards me because I am the reason it looks like this:

And when Phone next played The Vandals’s song “My Girlfriend’s Dead”, Zombie Phone and I said a civil goodnight to one another and I plugged it in and went to bed.

No “Love you” or anything.

And then I just laid in bed thinking of how I am quarantined with creatures and technological devices who hate me or are marching against me. And ohhhhhhh what are the mice doing right now?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?

But, regardless of what’s happening, and even if there are armed people assembling who aren’t making sense or rodents and moths conspiring against you,

there are still more of us than there are of them.

Well, we are definitely outnumbered by mice because I could build a nice-sized house from the number of dead mice bodies I have chucked in the trash and the live ones keep on coming, so there are definitely more mice than humans in this particular apartment but

I am attempting to be inspirational. More of us than them.

Like how Elisha said it in the Bible and Zorii said it in “”The Last” Star Wars”.