​He woke up in a New York City sewer feeling refreshed but hungry. Slowly he got moving and crawled his way through the damp and smelly sewer pipes which were just the way he liked things. He paused at the top of the sewer and looked through its grates to see what was going on in the streets of New York. It was garbage day, his favorite day of the week and later tonight he would join up with his rat buddies and go tear things up. By tearing things up that meant that they were going to tear up garbage bags and feast on all of the rotten and rancid food. 

​For the last three weeks as I slept on the couch in my living room I kept hearing something up in the attic that sounded like a rodent running from side to side. Finally one day I decided that the noise was irritating enough to have a look, so I grabbed a ladder, climbed the rungs to the top step and popped open the trap door to the attic. I inched my head inside and swung in my arm which held a flashlight and then snapped on the beam. Slowly I scanned the flashlight in arcs and looked for anything that was suspicious. First I scanned the bottom and then I scanned the top. And just as I tilted my flashlight to check the corners of the attic something whizzed in front of my face. I pulled back to avoid getting hit. That's when I knew that I had a bat in the attic. I shone my flashlight over into the corner and there he was stuck to a beam, waiting to make his next swoop across the attic. I quickly stepped down a couple of rungs on the ladder and closed the trap door. I knew that as long as the bat stayed in the attic it could do no harm. I thought about calling an exterminator but I was very busy at work and I couldn't afford to take a day off to wait for an exterminator that likely would not show up. I decided to just leave it for a week or so. 

​Nearly a decade ago I traveled with my father up north in Canada to an abandoned Cold War radar base bordering the North West Territories. It was a 14 hour drive from his house but my father wanted to visit the radar base that he had nearly spent a whole decade working at. I asked him many times over the years what he did at the base and everytime the answer was: "Sorry, I can't tell you son, that's classified."

​I had just come back home from a movie with my girlfriend. The flick was a modern type of horror film that didn't really have a story or plot, it was nothing more than a gruesome movie about creepy crawlers such as maggots, leeches and killer ants that attacked people by burrowing under their skin and eating them from the inside out. My girlfriend loved the movie but for me it was lame, it seemed like a never ending sequence of special effects that was made to rattle your brain and jolt your nerves. I was convinced that the makers of these movies had done all types of experiments on people to see what unnerved a person the most. I also found the sound in the movie and the use of rapid cutting techniques in the editing process very unsettling and many times throughout the movie I felt nauseous. If this was what the film makers had wanted to achieve, they certainly deserved a round of applause.