One of the nicest things about living in the suburbs is that you get a better class of vermin.  In the city, you got your three basic types of vermin: rats, mice, and cockroaches.  They’re all horrible.  And no matter where you live, or how nice your place, you end up dealing with them at some point.

Rats, of course, are the worst, but unless you’re living in a hovel, you probably don’t have them in your home.  It’s just that they’re everywhere else, hiding out and just waiting until you’re staggering your way home after a long day at work or a long night of drinking, just biding their time until they JUMP OUT FROM BEHIND THE GARBAGE CANS GAHHHHHHHH.  Just the worst.  I’ve seen rats the size of cats, bigger than most dogs people have in the city, pacing around on the subway tracks, in alleys — they’re everywhere in the city.  Now, I guess we must have rats in the suburbs, too, but I just don’t see them as much.  I think rats like the city better.  They’re very sophisticated, those rats.

I had mice in my apartment, of course, pretty much every apartment I ever had in Manhattan. The only good thing about having mice was that I could pretend that I was their MOUSE GOD.  Like a real God, I had the power of life or death over them.  I could be a beneficent God, getting lazy and leaving food on a dirty plate in the sink, creating a bountiful harvest.  Or I could be a vengeful God, smiting them with the Plague of the Trays of Glue.  When you’re 25, living alone in the city, no money, working for The Man, you take your opportunities to be ALL-POWERFUL where you can get them.

But I wasn’t really cut out to be Mouse God.  I’m too much of a softie, definitely more of a New Testament Mouse God.  Mouse traps are horrible things.  Have you ever heard a mouse scream when he realizes that he’s stuck in a glue trap.  It’s a horrible sound.  And then what are you supposed to do with a glue trap that has a mouse stuck to it, the poor mouse terrified, struggling to get away, looking at his Mouse God and begging for mercy?  Horrible.  I never knew what to do — the kind thing would be to kill it quickly, but I don’t quite have it in me to take a hammer and beat a mouse to death with it.  And if you throw it away, you’re consigning that mouse to a miserable starvation death in the garbage.  No good option.

Now, cockroaches are a different story.  When I’m retired, I’ll happily take a part-time job hammering cockroaches to death, if someone was willing to pay me to do it.  DIE COCKROACH DIE.  No problems there. Very satisfying work.  I’d hammer away all day long.  So would you.  Nothing worse than coming home, turning on the light, and seeing a bunch of cockroaches scurrying away from your kitchen sink.  And then you also have those “water bugs,” which are giant mutant cockroaches that sneak into bathrooms.  Every time they did construction on our block, we’d get an infusion of those water bugs everywhere we had a faucet.

So if you were to ask me what I love about the suburbs, I’d have to say that I love the better class of vermin we have out here. Three years, I’ve yet to see a mouse, a rat, or a cockroach.  Instead, we have really cute vermin, like deer.  Seriously.  Deer.  That’s our biggest problem.  Because, you know, they eat stuff from the gardens.  Isn’t that awful!  And instead of rats, we have squirrels.  Cute little squirrels, big bushy tails, scampering joyfully from tree to tree, saving up those nuts for winter.  Awwwwwww.

Of course, once in a while, a bear comes down from the local state park and tries to eat us or our dogs.  That’s not good.  And one more reason why I live in a condo, because most bears have trouble navigating elevators.

But that’s unusual.  And, anyway, what’s worse — dealing with rats and mice and cockroaches in the city every single day, or taking a very small chance of someday getting eaten by a bear in the suburbs?

I thought so.